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This paper studies stochastic control problems with the action space taken to be probability measures, with the objective penalised by the relative entropy. We identify suitable metric space on which we construct a gradient flow for the…
We study the global convergence of policy gradient for infinite-horizon, continuous state and action space, and entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs). We consider a softmax policy with (one-hidden layer) neural network…
In this work we propose to fit a sparse logistic regression model by a weakly convex regularized nonconvex optimization problem. The idea is based on the finding that a weakly convex function as an approximation of the $\ell_0$ pseudo norm…
Regularization is a central tool for addressing ill-posedness in inverse problems and statistical estimation, with the choice of a suitable penalty often determining the reliability and interpretability of downstream solutions. While recent…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for non-smooth (stochastic or deterministic) convex optimization assumes that the objective function is uniformly Lipschitz continuous with parameter $M_f$. However, in many…
In this paper, we present a novel control scheme for feedback optimization. That is, we propose a discrete-time controller that can steer the steady state of a physical plant to the solution of a constrained optimization problem without…
Solving inverse problems \(Ax = y\) is central to a variety of practically important fields such as medical imaging, remote sensing, and non-destructive testing. The most successful and theoretically best-understood method is convex…
Existing Maximum-Entropy (MaxEnt) Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods for continuous action spaces are typically formulated based on actor-critic frameworks and optimized through alternating steps of policy evaluation and policy…
In this paper, we analyse the recovery properties of nonconvex regularized $M$-estimators, under the assumption that the true parameter is of soft sparsity. In the statistical aspect, we establish the recovery bound for any stationary point…
In this paper, we study a consensus-based optimization method for nonconvex bi-level optimization, where the objective is to minimize an upper-level function over the set of global minimizers of a lower-level problem. The proposed approach…
Regularization-based approaches for injecting constraints in Machine Learning (ML) were introduced to improve a predictive model via expert knowledge. We tackle the issue of finding the right balance between the loss (the accuracy of the…
In this paper, we consider a finite-dimensional optimization problem minimizing a continuous objective on a compact domain subject to a multi-dimensional constraint function. For the latter, we assume the availability of a global Lipschitz…
A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…
A regularization algorithm allowing random noise in derivatives and inexact function values is proposed for computing approximate local critical points of any order for smooth unconstrained optimization problems. For an objective function…
Adaptive momentum methods have recently attracted a lot of attention for training of deep neural networks. They use an exponential moving average of past gradients of the objective function to update both search directions and learning…
Variable selection is a fundamental task in statistical data analysis. Sparsity-inducing regularization methods are a popular class of methods that simultaneously perform variable selection and model estimation. The central problem is a…
We consider the problem of optimizing an approximately convex function over a bounded convex set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ using only function evaluations. The problem is reduced to sampling from an \emph{approximately} log-concave distribution…
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…
This work proposes an efficient batch algorithm for feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL) with theoretical convergence guarantees. To mitigate the estimation bias inherent in conventional regularization schemes, the first…
We study global optimization of non-convex functions through optimal control theory. Our main result establishes that (quasi-)optimal trajectories of a discounted control problem converge globally and practically asymptotically to the set…