Related papers: Learning Deterministic Surrogates for Robust Conve…
Uncertainty estimation in machine learning has traditionally focused on the prediction stage, aiming to quantify confidence in model outputs while treating learned representations as deterministic and reliable by default. In this work, we…
Neural networks have shown tremendous potential for reconstructing high-resolution images in inverse problems. The non-convex and opaque nature of neural networks, however, hinders their utility in sensitive applications such as medical…
In recent years there has been a collective research effort to find new formulations of reinforcement learning that are simultaneously more efficient and more amenable to analysis. This paper concerns one approach that builds on the linear…
Learning to optimize - the idea that we can learn from data algorithms that optimize a numerical criterion - has recently been at the heart of a growing number of research efforts. One of the most challenging issues within this approach is…
Decision-focused learning (DFL) is an increasingly popular paradigm for training predictive models whose outputs are used in decision-making tasks. Instead of merely optimizing for predictive accuracy, DFL trains models to directly minimize…
Decision-making under uncertainty is often considered in two stages: predicting the unknown parameters, and then optimizing decisions based on predictions. While traditional prediction-focused learning (PFL) treats these two stages…
A candidate explanation of the good empirical performance of deep neural networks is the implicit regularization effect of first order optimization methods. Inspired by this, we prove a convergence theorem for nonconvex composite…
When solving optimization problems under uncertainty with contextual data, utilizing machine learning to predict the uncertain parameters' values is a popular and effective approach. Decision-focused learning (DFL) aims at learning a…
The goal of this tutorial is to introduce key models, algorithms, and open questions related to the use of optimization methods for solving problems arising in machine learning. It is written with an INFORMS audience in mind, specifically…
It is well known that the extension of Watkins' algorithm to general function approximation settings is challenging: does the projected Bellman equation have a solution? If so, is the solution useful in the sense of generating a good…
Robust and distributionally robust optimization are modeling paradigms for decision-making under uncertainty where the uncertain parameters are only known to reside in an uncertainty set or are governed by any probability distribution from…
A key concern in integrating machine learning models in medicine is the ability to interpret their reasoning. Popular explainability methods have demonstrated satisfactory results in natural image recognition, yet in medical image analysis,…
We develop a machine-learning framework to learn hyperparameter sequences for accelerated first-order methods (e.g., the step size and momentum sequences in accelerated gradient descent) to quickly solve parametric convex optimization…
Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…
Deep unrolling, or unfolding, is an emerging learning-to-optimize method that unrolls a truncated iterative algorithm in the layers of a trainable neural network. However, the convergence guarantees and generalizability of the unrolled…
Creating impact in real-world settings requires artificial intelligence techniques to span the full pipeline from data, to predictive models, to decisions. These components are typically approached separately: a machine learning model is…
We study the problem of policy synthesis for uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs). The transition probability function of uPOMDPs is only known to belong to a so-called uncertainty set, for instance in the form…
Recent work has shown how to embed differentiable optimization problems (that is, problems whose solutions can be backpropagated through) as layers within deep learning architectures. This method provides a useful inductive bias for certain…
In recent years, there has been a growing research interest in decision-focused learning, which embeds optimization problems as a layer in learning pipelines and demonstrates a superior performance than the prediction-focused approach.…
Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…