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Unconstrained optimization problems become more common in scientific computing and engineering applications with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, and numerical methods for solving them more quickly and efficiently have been…
A class of exact penalty-type local search methods for optimal control problems with nonsmooth cost functional, nonsmooth (but continuous) dynamics, and nonsmooth state and control constraints is presented, in which the the penalty…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
Designing effective model-based reinforcement learning algorithms is difficult because the ease of data generation must be weighed against the bias of model-generated data. In this paper, we study the role of model usage in policy…
Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…
In this work, we consider methods for solving large-scale optimization problems with a possibly nonsmooth objective function. The key idea is to first specify a class of optimization algorithms using a generic iterative scheme involving…
In this paper, we propose a new Fully Composite Formulation of convex optimization problems. It includes, as a particular case, the problems with functional constraints, max-type minimization problems, and problems of Composite…
We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
This paper studies decision-making and statistical inference for two-sided matching markets via matrix completion. In contrast to the independent sampling assumed in classical matrix completion literature, the observed entries, which arise…
This paper explores a method for solving constrained optimization problems when the derivatives of the objective function are unavailable, while the derivatives of the constraints are known. We allow the objective and constraint function to…
In optimal experimental design, the objective is to select a limited set of experiments that maximizes information about unknown model parameters based on factor levels. This work addresses the generalized D-optimal design problem, allowing…
Many practical optimization problems involve objective function values that are corrupted by unavoidable numerical errors. In smooth nonconvex optimization, quasi-Newton methods combined with line search are widely used due to their…
A cutting-plane model for a nonsmooth function is the maximum of several first-order expansions centered at different points. Using such a model in a bundle method leads to linear convergence (of serious steps) to a minimum. In smooth…
Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…
In this paper, we consider two distinct challenges in the resolution of nonsmooth stochastic optimization. Of these, the first pertains to the pronounced dependence of dimension in Gaussian smoothing-enabled zeroth-order schemes, impeding…
This paper focuses on finding approximate solutions to stochastic optimal control problems with control domains being not necessarily convex, where the state trajectory is subject to controlled stochastic differential equations. The…
We present a sampling-based control approach that can generate smooth actions for general nonlinear systems without external smoothing algorithms. Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control has been utilized in numerous robotic…
Model-based offline optimization with dynamics-aware policy provides a new perspective for policy learning and out-of-distribution generalization, where the learned policy could adapt to different dynamics enumerated at the training stage.…
Achieving global optimality in nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) is challenging due to the non-convex nature of the underlying optimization problem. Since commonly employed local optimization techniques depend on carefully chosen…
Numerically computing global policies to optimal control problems for complex dynamical systems is mostly intractable. In consequence, a number of approximation methods have been developed. However, none of the current methods can quantify…