Related papers: Contextual Learning for Stochastic Optimization
Pandora's Box is a fundamental stochastic optimization problem, where the decision-maker must find a good alternative while minimizing the search cost of exploring the value of each alternative. In the original formulation, it is assumed…
A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
Decision-making problems often feature uncertainty stemming from heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences. To address this, we propose a sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline to learn preference distributions and…
Two central problems in Stochastic Optimization are Min Sum Set Cover and Pandora's Box. In Pandora's Box, we are presented with $n$ boxes, each containing an unknown value and the goal is to open the boxes in some order to minimize the sum…
Contextual stochastic optimization is an advanced methodology to model uncertainty in the presence of contextual information during decision planning processes. Although classical methodologies focus on minimizing the expectation of a…
We introduce a stochastic contextual bandit model where at each time step the environment chooses a distribution over a context set and samples the context from this distribution. The learner observes only the context distribution while the…
We study the sample complexity of stochastic convex optimization when problem parameters, e.g., the distance to optimality, are unknown. We pursue two strategies. First, we develop a reliable model selection method that avoids overfitting…
We study the scenario approach for solving chance-constrained optimization in time-coupled dynamic environments. Scenario generation methods approximate the true feasible region from scenarios generated independently and identically from…
We consider the problem of learning from training data obtained in different contexts, where the underlying context distribution is unknown and is estimated empirically. We develop a robust method that takes into account the uncertainty of…
Social and real-world considerations such as robustness, fairness, social welfare and multi-agent tradeoffs have given rise to multi-distribution learning paradigms, such as collaborative learning, group distributionally robust…
We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…
We present the viewpoint that optimization problems encountered in machine learning can often be interpreted as minimizing a convex functional over a function space, but with a non-convex constraint set introduced by model parameterization.…
We study the problem of contextual search, a multidimensional generalization of binary search that captures many problems in contextual decision-making. In contextual search, a learner is trying to learn the value of a hidden vector $v \in…
We study the unconstrained minimization of a smooth and strongly convex population loss function under a stochastic oracle that introduces both additive and multiplicative noise; this is a canonical and widely-studied setting that arises…
Many stochastic optimization problems include chance constraints that enforce constraint satisfaction with a specific probability; however, solving an optimization problem with chance constraints assumes that the solver has access to the…
We consider a simulation optimization problem for a context-dependent decision-making, which aims to determine the top-m designs for all contexts. Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the optimal dynamic sampling decision as a…
We consider a stochastic optimization problem involving two random variables: a context variable $X$ and a dependent variable $Y$. The objective is to minimize the expected value of a nonlinear loss functional applied to the conditional…
In this dissertation we study statistical and online learning problems from an optimization viewpoint.The dissertation is divided into two parts : I. We first consider the question of learnability for statistical learning problems in the…
We propose a risk-averse statistical learning framework wherein the performance of a learning algorithm is evaluated by the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of losses rather than the expected loss. We devise algorithms based on stochastic…