Related papers: Non-convex entropic mean-field optimization via Be…
This paper investigates the robust optimal control of sampled-data stochastic systems with multiplicative noise and distributional ambiguity. We consider a class of discrete-time optimal control problems where the controller \emph{jointly}…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
We consider an optimal control problem governed by a rate-inde\-pendent system with non-convex energy. The state equation is approximated by means of viscous regularization w.r.t.\ to hierarchy of two different Hilbert spaces. The…
Convex regularizers are often used for sparse learning. They are easy to optimize, but can lead to inferior prediction performance. The difference of $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ ($\ell_{1-2}$) regularizer has been recently proposed as a nonconvex…
Trace norm regularization is a widely used approach for learning low rank matrices. A standard optimization strategy is based on formulating the problem as one of low rank matrix factorization which, however, leads to a non-convex problem.…
In this work, we investigate the regularized solutions and their finite element solutions to the inverse source problems governed by partial differential equations, and establish the stochastic convergence and optimal finite element…
We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…
Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…
Many tasks in machine learning and signal processing can be solved by minimizing a convex function of a measure. This includes sparse spikes deconvolution or training a neural network with a single hidden layer. For these problems, we study…
We study a variant of a recently introduced min-max optimization framework where the max-player is constrained to update its parameters in a greedy manner until it reaches a first-order stationary point. Our equilibrium definition for this…
We study a counterfactual mean-variance optimization, where the mean and variance are defined as functionals of counterfactual distributions. The optimization problem defines the optimal resource allocation under various constraints in a…
The problem of minimizing convex functionals of probability distributions is solved under the assumption that the density of every distribution is bounded from above and below. A system of sufficient and necessary first-order optimality…
Selecting the best hyperparameters for a particular optimization instance, such as the learning rate and momentum, is an important but nonconvex problem. As a result, iterative optimization methods such as hypergradient descent lack global…
This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to solve the risk-averse optimal control (RAOC) problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems. While successful RL algorithms have been presented to learn optimal control…
This paper presents a particle-based optimization method designed for addressing minimization problems with equality constraints, particularly in cases where the loss function exhibits non-differentiability or non-convexity. The proposed…
In this work we consider numerical efficiency and convergence rates for solvers of non-convex multi-penalty formulations when reconstructing sparse signals from noisy linear measurements. We extend an existing approach, based on reduction…
This paper considers the problem of recovering either a low rank matrix or a sparse vector from observations of linear combinations of the vector or matrix elements. Recent methods replace the non-convex regularization with $\ell_1$ or…
We propose \textit{Meta-Regularization}, a novel approach for the adaptive choice of the learning rate in first-order gradient descent methods. Our approach modifies the objective function by adding a regularization term on the learning…
The cubic regularization method (CR) and its adaptive version (ARC) are popular Newton-type methods in solving unconstrained non-convex optimization problems, due to its global convergence to local minima under mild conditions. The main aim…
Nonconvex methods have emerged as a dominant approach for low-rank matrix estimation, a problem that arises widely in machine learning and AI for learning and representing high-dimensional data. Existing analyses for these methods often…