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Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is a popular variance reduction technique for accelerating stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide a first analysis of the method for solving a class of linear inverse problems in the lens…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-01-19 Bangti Jin , Zehui Zhou , Jun Zou

In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-13 Aleksandr Beznosikov , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Alexander Gasnikov

This article explores the discrete-time stochastic optimal LQR control with delay and quadratic constraints. The inclusion of delay, compared to delay-free optimal LQR control with quadratic constraints, significantly increases the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-19 Dawei Liu , Juanjuan Xu , huanshui Zhang

Feedback control problems involving autonomous quadratic systems are prevalent, yet there are only a limited number of software tools available for approximating their solution due to the complexity of the problem. This paper represents a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-09 Jeff Borggaard , Lizette Zietsman

We study the global linear convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods for finite-horizon continuous-time exploratory linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems. The setting includes stochastic LQC problems with indefinite costs and allows…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-05 Michael Giegrich , Christoph Reisinger , Yufei Zhang

Two-time-scale optimization is a framework introduced in Zeng et al. (2024) that abstracts a range of policy evaluation and policy optimization problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Akin to bi-level optimization under a particular type…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan

Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-08 David Newton , Raghu Bollapragada , Raghu Pasupathy , Nung Kwan Yip

The Double Linear Policy (DLP) framework guarantees a Robust Positive Expectation (RPE) under optimized constant-weight designs or admissible prespecified time-varying policies. However, the sequential optimization of these time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Tan Chin Hong , Chung-Han Hsieh

We propose a computational framework for replacing the repeated numerical solution of differential Riccati equations in finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problems by a learned operator surrogate. Instead of solving a nonlinear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-22 Jun Chen , Umberto Biccari , Junmin Wang

We study the problem of adaptive control of the stochastic linear quadratic regulator (LQR) with constraints that must be satisfied at every time step. Prior work on the multidimensional problem has shown $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-08 Spencer Hutchinson , Nanfei Jiang , Mahnoosh Alizadeh

Feedback optimization has emerged as a promising approach for optimizing the steady-state operation of dynamical systems while requiring minimal modeling efforts. Unfortunately, most existing feedback optimization methods rely on knowledge…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Amir Mehrnoosh , Gianluca Bianchin

In this paper, we study nonconvex constrained stochastic zeroth-order optimization problems, for which we have access to exact information of constraints and noisy function values of the objective. We propose a Bregman linearized augmented…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-15 Qiankun Shi , Xiao Wang , Hao Wang

This paper studies the linear quadratic regulation (LQR) problem of unknown discrete-time systems via dynamic output feedback learning control. In contrast to the state feedback, the optimality of the dynamic output feedback control for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-29 Kedi Xie , Martin Guay , Shimin Wang , Fang Deng , Maobin Lu

Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Kaiqing Zhang , Xiangyuan Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

Policy optimization (PO), an essential approach of reinforcement learning for a broad range of system classes, requires significantly more system data than indirect (identification-followed-by-control) methods or behavioral-based direct…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-18 Feiran Zhao , Florian Dörfler , Keyou You

Risk-aware control, though with promise to tackle unexpected events, requires a known exact dynamical model. In this work, we propose a model-free framework to learn a risk-aware controller with a focus on the linear system. We formulate it…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-06-01 Feiran Zhao , Keyou You

In this study, we introduce numerical methods for discretizing continuous-time linear-quadratic optimal control problems (LQ-OCPs). The discretization of continuous-time LQ-OCPs is formulated into differential equation systems, and we can…

We investigate the problem of learning linear quadratic regulators (LQR) in a multi-task, heterogeneous, and model-free setting. We characterize the stability and personalization guarantees of a policy gradient-based (PG) model-agnostic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Leonardo F. Toso , Donglin Zhan , James Anderson , Han Wang

A classical approach for solving discrete time nonlinear control on a finite horizon consists in repeatedly minimizing linear quadratic approximations of the original problem around current candidate solutions. While widely popular in many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Vincent Roulet , Siddhartha Srinivasa , Maryam Fazel , Zaid Harchaoui

We propose a method for finding approximate compilations of quantum unitary transformations, based on techniques from policy gradient reinforcement learning. The choice of a stochastic policy allows us to rephrase the optimization problem…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-09-14 David A. Herrera-Martí