Related papers: Strong Duality Relations in Nonconvex Risk-Constra…

We show that a wide class of risk-constrained nonconvex functional optimization problems exhibit strong duality, regardless of nonconvexity. We develop two novel results under distinct sets of assumptions, establishing strong duality over…

Though learning has become a core component of modern information processing, there is now ample evidence that it can lead to biased, unsafe, and prejudiced systems. The need to impose requirements on learning is therefore paramount,…

Autonomous agents must often deal with conflicting requirements, such as completing tasks using the least amount of time/energy, learning multiple tasks, or dealing with multiple opponents. In the context of reinforcement learning~(RL),…

We examine the duality theory for a class of non-convex functions obtained by composing a convex function with a continuous one. Using Fenchel duality, we derive a dual problem that satisfies weak duality under general assumptions. To…

We prove weak duality between two recent convex relaxation methods for bounding the optimal value of a constrained variational problem in which the objective is an integral functional. The first approach, proposed by Valmorbida et al. (IEEE…

With the widespread adoption of machine learning systems, the need to curtail their behavior has become increasingly apparent. This is evidenced by recent advancements towards developing models that satisfy robustness, safety, and fairness…

This paper generalizes results concerning strong convexity of two-stage mean-risk models with linear recourse to distortion risk measures. Introducing the concept of (restricted) partial strong convexity, we conduct an in-depth analysis of…

The key task of machine learning is to minimize the loss function that measures the model fit to the training data. The numerical methods to do this efficiently depend on the properties of the loss function. The most decisive among these…

Training deep neural networks is a challenging non-convex optimization problem. Recent work has proven that the strong duality holds (which means zero duality gap) for regularized finite-width two-layer ReLU networks and consequently…

Despite strong performance in numerous applications, the fragility of deep learning to input perturbations has raised serious questions about its use in safety-critical domains. While adversarial training can mitigate this issue in…

We present a new duality theory for non-convex variational problems, under possibly mixed Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The dual problem reads nicely as a linear programming problem, and our main result states that there is no…

We develop a novel primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth and nonlinear compositional convex minimization problems, which covers many existing and brand-new models as special cases. Our approach relies on a combination of a new…

The framework of this paper is that of risk measuring under uncertainty, which is when no reference probability measure is given. To every regular convex risk measure on ${\cal C}_b(\Omega)$, we associate a unique equivalence class of…

In this article we develop a duality principle suitable for a large class of problems in optimization. The main result is obtained through basic tools of convex analysis and duality theory. We establish a correct relation between the…

As a popular meta-learning approach, the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm has been widely used due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, the convergence of the general multi-step MAML still remains unexplored. In this…

Several recently proposed architectures of neural networks such as ResNeXt, Inception, Xception, SqueezeNet and Wide ResNet are based on the designing idea of having multiple branches and have demonstrated improved performance in many…

Learning methods in Banach spaces are often formulated as regularization problems which minimize the sum of a data fidelity term in a Banach norm and a regularization term in another Banach norm. Due to the infinite dimensional nature of…

The purpose of this paper is to give a selective survey on recent progress in random metric theory and its applications to conditional risk measures. This paper includes eight sections. Section 1 is a longer introduction, which gives a…

Safety assurance is uncompromisable for safety-critical environments with the presence of drastic model uncertainties (e.g., distributional shift), especially with humans in the loop. However, incorporating uncertainty in safe learning will…

We investigate 1) the rate at which refined properties of the empirical risk---in particular, gradients---converge to their population counterparts in standard non-convex learning tasks, and 2) the consequences of this convergence for…