Related papers: Stochastic Dimension-reduced Second-order Methods …
Motion planning and control problems are embedded and essential in almost all robotics applications. These problems are often formulated as stochastic optimal control problems and solved using dynamic programming algorithms. Unfortunately,…
In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic…
In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…
Algorithms for bilevel optimization often encounter Hessian computations, which are prohibitive in high dimensions. While recent works offer first-order methods for unconstrained bilevel problems, the constrained setting remains relatively…
Applications such as unbalanced and fully shuffled regression can be approached by optimizing regularized optimal transport (OT) distances, such as the entropic OT and Sinkhorn distances. A common approach for this optimization is to use a…
We consider the problem of finding an approximate second-order stationary point of a constrained non-convex optimization problem. We first show that, unlike the gradient descent method for unconstrained optimization, the vanilla projected…
In this paper we present a novel quasi-Newton algorithm for use in stochastic optimisation. Quasi-Newton methods have had an enormous impact on deterministic optimisation problems because they afford rapid convergence and computationally…
In this paper, we introduce a Homogeneous Second-Order Descent Method (HSODM) using the homogenized quadratic approximation to the original function. The merit of homogenization is that only the leftmost eigenvector of a gradient-Hessian…
In this work we derive a second-order approach to bilevel optimization, a type of mathematical programming in which the solution to a parameterized optimization problem (the "lower" problem) is itself to be optimized (in the "upper"…
In this work, we consider solving optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Sequential Quadratic Programming method to find both first- and second-order stationary…
Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…
In this paper, we present a policy gradient method that avoids exploratory noise injection and performs policy search over the deterministic landscape. By avoiding noise injection all sources of estimation variance can be eliminated in…
Derivative-free Riemannian optimization (DFRO) aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, under the constraint that the decision variables lie on a Riemannian manifold. The rapid increase in problem dimensions…
Sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) is continuing an active research field nowadays for high dimensional data. It aims to estimate the central subspace (CS) without making distributional assumption. To overcome the large-$p$-small-$n$…
We present an algorithm for minimizing a sum of functions that combines the computational efficiency of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with the second order curvature information leveraged by quasi-Newton methods. We unify these…
The recent remarkable progress of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) stands on regularization of policy for stable and efficient learning. A popular method, named proximal policy optimization (PPO), has been introduced for this purpose. PPO…
We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…
Escaping saddle points is a central research topic in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a simple gradient-based algorithm such that for a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$, it outputs an…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…