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We prove convergence of the proximal policy gradient method for a class of constrained stochastic control problems with control in both the drift and diffusion of the state process. The problem requires either the running or terminal cost…
In this paper, we consider a class of structured nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems, in which the objective function is formed by the sum of a possibly nonsmooth nonconvex function and a differentiable function whose gradient is…
We consider stochastic optimization problems involving an expected value of a nonlinear function of a base random vector and a conditional expectation of another function depending on the base random vector, a dependent random vector, and…
In this paper we present a new method for solving optimization problems involving the sum of two proper, convex, lower semicontinuous functions, one of which has Lipschitz continuous gradient. The proposed method has a hybrid nature that…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function using proximal-gradient methods, where an error is present in the calculation of the gradient of the smooth term or in the proximity…
In this paper we introduce two novel generalizations of the theory for gradient descent type methods in the proximal setting. First, we introduce the proportion function, which we further use to analyze all known (and many new)…
Nonconvex optimization problems arise in different research fields and arouse lots of attention in signal processing, statistics and machine learning. In this work, we explore the accelerated proximal gradient method and some of its…
In this paper, we consider continuous-time stochastic optimal control problems where the cost is evaluated through a coherent risk measure. We provide an explicit gradient descent-ascent algorithm which applies to problems subject to…
Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…
In this paper we consider distributed optimization problems in which the cost function is separable, i.e., a sum of possibly non-smooth functions all sharing a common variable, and can be split into a strongly convex term and a convex one.…
This paper deals with composite optimization problems having the objective function formed as the sum of two terms, one has Lipschitz continuous gradient along random subspaces and may be nonconvex and the second term is simple and…
We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…
Distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problems have recently received attention due to the growing interest of signal processing, computer vision, and natural language processing communities in applications deployed over…
The aim of this survey is to present the main important techniques and tools from variational analysis used for first and second order dynamical systems of implicit type for solving monotone inclusions and non-smooth optimization problems.…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) methods have become fundamental optimization tools in machine learning, combining the computational efficiency of stochastic gradients with the acceleration benefits of momentum. Despite…
This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing continuous submodular functions that naturally arise in many learning applications such as those involving utility functions in active learning and sensing, matrix approximations and network…