Related papers: Operator Splitting for Convex Constrained Markov D…
Approximate dynamic programming is a popular method for solving large Markov decision processes. This paper describes a new class of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods- distributionally robust ADP-that address the curse of…
Douglas-Rachford method is a splitting algorithm for finding a zero of the sum of two maximal monotone operators. Each of its iterations requires the sequential solution of two proximal subproblems. The aim of this work is to present a…
This paper derives new inexact variants of the Douglas-Rachford splitting method for maximal monotone operators and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for convex optimization. The analysis is based on a new inexact…
It was recently shown that dynamic programming (DP) methods for finding static CVaR-optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can fail when based on the dual formulation, yet the root cause of this failure remains unclear. We…
We consider resolvent splitting algorithms for finding a zero of the sum of finitely many maximally monotone operators. The standard approach to solving this type of problem involves reformulating as a two-operator problem in the…
We study the applicability of the Peaceman-Rachford (PR) splitting method for solving nonconvex optimization problems. When applied to minimizing the sum of a strongly convex Lipschitz differentiable function and a proper closed function,…
Nonconvex optimization problems are widespread in modern machine learning and data science. We introduce an extrapolation strategy into a class of preconditioned second-order convex splitting algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems.…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are known to be sensitive to parameter specification. Distributionally robust MDPs alleviate this issue by allowing for \emph{ambiguity sets} which give a set of possible distributions over parameter sets.…
The paper deals with finite-state Markov decision processes (MDPs) with integer weights assigned to each state-action pair. New algorithms are presented to classify end components according to their limiting behavior with respect to the…
We consider convex optimization problems formulated using dynamic programming equations. Such problems can be solved using the Dual Dynamic Programming algorithm combined with the Level 1 cut selection strategy or the Territory algorithm to…
We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…
We consider the reinforcement learning problem for the constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), which plays a central role in satisfying safety or resource constraints in sequential learning and decision-making. In this problem, we are…
The Douglas-Rachford algorithm can be represented as the fixed point iteration of a firmly nonexpansive operator. When the operator has no fixed points, the algorithm's iterates diverge, but the difference between consecutive iterates…
Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In this paper we mainly concentrate on SP…
The goal of this paper is to study approaches to bridge the gap between first-order and second-order type methods for composite convex programs. Our key observations are: i) Many well-known operator splitting methods, such as…
In this work, we study the problem of actively classifying the attributes of dynamical systems characterized as a finite set of Markov decision process (MDP) models. We are interested in finding strategies that actively interact with the…
We propose a continuous-time second-order optimization algorithm for solving unconstrained convex optimization problems with bounded Hessian. We show that this alternative algorithm has a comparable convergence rate to that of the…
The main goal of this paper is to investigate continuous-time distributed dynamic programming (DP) algorithms for networked multi-agent Markov decision problems (MAMDPs). In our study, we adopt a distributed multi-agent framework where…
Many discrete optimization problems are amenable to constrained shortest-path reformulations in an extended network space, a technique that has been key in convexification, bound strengthening, and search. In this paper, we propose a…