Related papers: Operator Splitting for Convex Constrained Markov D…
To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…
The Douglas--Rachford algorithm is a classical and very successful splitting method for finding the zeros of the sums of monotone operators. When the underlying operators are normal cone operators, the algorithm solves a convex feasibility…
Several well-known algorithms in the field of combinatorial optimization can be interpreted in terms of the primal-dual method for solving linear programs. For example, Dijkstra's algorithm, the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, and the Hungarian…
This paper proposes and analyzes a new operator splitting method for stochastic Maxwell equations driven by additive noise, which not only decomposes the original multi-dimensional system into some local one-dimensional subsystems, but also…
We consider multiple parallel Markov decision processes (MDPs) coupled by global constraints, where the time varying objective and constraint functions can only be observed after the decision is made. Special attention is given to how well…
In this work, we introduce the notion of warped Yosida regularization and study the asymptotic behavior of the orbit of dynamical systems generated by warped Yosida regularization, which includes Douglas-Rachford dynamical system. We…
Planning under partial obervability is essential for autonomous robots. A principled way to address such planning problems is the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Although solving POMDPs is computationally intractable,…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for robust infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with non-rectangular uncertainty sets, thereby addressing an open challenge in the robust MDP literature. Indeed, uncertainty sets that…
We develop stochastic first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems. When the saddle function is strongly convex in the primal variable, we develop the first stochastic restart scheme for this…
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…
We study distributed composite optimization over networks: agents minimize the sum of a smooth (strongly) convex function, the agents' sum-utility, plus a non-smooth (extended-valued) convex one. We propose a general algorithmic framework…
We consider chance-constrained problems with discrete random distribution. We aim for problems with a large number of scenarios. We propose a novel method based on the stochastic gradient descent method which performs updates of the…
Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…
There are no computationally feasible algorithms that provide solutions to the finite horizon Risk-sensitive Constrained Markov Decision Process (Risk-CMDP) problem, even for problems with moderate horizon. With an aim to design the same,…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of convex functions. The applications include empirical risk minimization problems in statistical machine learning where the datasets are large and have to be stored on…
In dual decomposition, the dual to an optimization problem with a specific structure is solved in distributed fashion using (sub)gradient and recently also fast gradient methods. The traditional dual decomposition suffers from two main…
In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…
Online and stochastic learning has emerged as powerful tool in large scale optimization. In this work, we generalize the Douglas-Rachford splitting (DRs) method for minimizing composite functions to online and stochastic settings (to our…
We study a stochastic program where the probability distribution of the uncertain problem parameters is unknown and only indirectly observed via finitely many correlated samples generated by an unknown Markov chain with $d$ states. We…
Constrained discrete optimization problems are encountered in many areas of communication and machine learning. We consider the case where the objective function satisfies Bellman's optimality principle without the constraints on which we…