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We describe an adaptive importance sampling algorithm for rare events that is based on a dual stochastic control formulation of a path sampling problem. Specifically, we focus on path functionals that have the form of cumulate generating…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
This paper studies the risk-averse mean-variance optimization in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). The involved variance metric concerns reward variability during the whole process, and future deviations are…
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) has become a widely used technique for safeguarding sensitive information in deep learning applications. Unfortunately, DPSGD's per-sample gradient clipping and uniform noise…
We study private stochastic convex optimization (SCO) under user-level differential privacy (DP) constraints. In this setting, there are $n$ users (e.g., cell phones), each possessing $m$ data items (e.g., text messages), and we need to…
Robotic manipulation tasks involving cutting deformable objects remain challenging due to complex topological behaviors, difficulties in perceiving dense object states, and the lack of efficient evaluation methods for cutting outcomes. In…
In this paper a class of combinatorial optimization problems is discussed. It is assumed that a solution can be constructed in two stages. The current first-stage costs are precisely known, while the future second-stage costs are only known…
We consider risk-averse convex stochastic programs expressed in terms of extended polyhedral risk measures. We derive computable confidence intervals on the optimal value of such stochastic programs using the Robust Stochastic Approximation…
Many practical applications of control require that constraints on the inputs and states of the system be respected, while optimizing some performance criterion. In the presence of model uncertainties or disturbances, for many control…
We introduce a fast and scalable method for solving quadratic programs with conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) constraints. While these problems can be formulated as standard quadratic programs, the number of variables and constraints grows…
The (R, s, S) is a stochastic inventory control policy widely used by practitioners. In an inventory system managed according to this policy, the inventory is reviewed at instant R; if the observed inventory position is lower than the…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
We consider how to use the Bellman residual of the dynamic programming operator to compute suboptimality bounds for solutions to stochastic shortest path problems. Such bounds have been previously established only in the special case that…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
This paper presents a novel algorithmic study with extensive numerical experiments of distributionally robust multistage convex optimization (DR-MCO). Following the previous work on dual dynamic programming (DDP) algorithmic framework for…
The solutions to many sequential decision-making problems are characterized by dynamic programming and Bellman's principle of optimality. However, due to the inherent complexity of solving Bellman's equation exactly, there has been…
A stagewise decomposition algorithm called value function gradient learning (VFGL) is proposed for large-scale multistage stochastic convex programs. VFGL finds the parameter values that best fit the gradient of the value function within a…
Dual Coordinate Descent (DCD) and Block Dual Coordinate Descent (BDCD) are important iterative methods for solving convex optimization problems. In this work, we develop scalable DCD and BDCD methods for the kernel support vector machines…
We introduce a novel numerical approach for a class of stochastic dynamic programs which arise as discretizations of backward stochastic differential equations or semi-linear partial differential equations. Solving such dynamic programs…
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…