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Safety-critical learning requires policies that improve performance without leaving the safe operating regime. We study constrained policy learning where model parameters must satisfy rollout-based safety constraints that can be evaluated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Shengfan Cao , Francesco Borrelli , Eunhyek Joa

Given a prediction task, understanding when one can and cannot design a consistent convex surrogate loss, particularly a low-dimensional one, is an important and active area of machine learning research. The prediction task may be given as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Jessie Finocchiaro , Rafael Frongillo , Bo Waggoner

Solving optimization problems with unknown parameters often requires learning a predictive model to predict the values of the unknown parameters and then solving the problem using these values. Recent work has shown that including the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Kai Wang , Bryan Wilder , Andrew Perrault , Milind Tambe

We consider minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the (possibly stochastic) gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, imitation learning and adversarial training. Our target optimization framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Jonathan Wilder Lavington , Sharan Vaswani , Reza Babanezhad , Mark Schmidt , Nicolas Le Roux

In this paper, we introduce a framework for contextual distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that considers the causal and continuous structure of the underlying distribution by developing interpretable and tractable decision rules…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Fenglin Zhang , Jie Wang

Prediction deviations of different uncertainties have varying impacts on downstream decision-making. Improving the prediction accuracy of critical uncertainties with significant impacts on decision-making quality yields better optimization…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-17 Yingrui Zhuang , Lin Cheng , Can Wan , Rui Xie , Ning Qi , Yue Chen

This paper introduces a novel approach to contextual stochastic optimization, integrating operations research and machine learning to address decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional methods often fail to leverage contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Louis Bouvier , Thibault Prunet , Vincent Leclère , Axel Parmentier

In this paper, we consider contextual stochastic optimization problems under endogenous uncertainty, where decisions affect the underlying distributions. To implement such decisions in practice, it is crucial to ensure that their outcomes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Jasone Ramírez-Ayerbe , Emma Frejinger

Contextual Stochastic Bilevel Optimization (CSBO) extends standard stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) by incorporating context-dependent lower-level problems. CSBO problems are generally intractable since existing methods require solving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Maxime Bouscary , Jiawei Zhang , Saurabh Amin

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Hongzhan Chen , Tao Yang , Yuhua Zhu , Shiping Gao , Xiaojun Quan , Ting Yao

In this paper, we develop a stochastic set-valued optimization (SVO) framework tailored for robust machine learning. In the SVO setting, each decision variable is mapped to a set of objective values, and optimality is defined via set…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

Structured prediction involves learning to predict complex structures rather than simple scalar values. The main challenge arises from the non-Euclidean nature of the output space, which generally requires relaxing the problem formulation.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-19 Junjie Yang , Matthieu Labeau , Florence d'Alché-Buc

Capturing latent variations ("contexts") is key to deploying reinforcement-learning (RL) agents beyond their training regime. We recast context-based RL as a dual inference-control problem and formally characterize two properties and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Yuliang Gu , Hongpeng Cao , Marco Caccamo , Naira Hovakimyan

Machine learning can significantly improve performance for decision-making under uncertainty across a wide range of domains. However, ensuring robustness guarantees requires well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, which can be difficult to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Christopher Yeh , Nicolas Christianson , Alan Wu , Adam Wierman , Yisong Yue

Robust optimization methods have shown practical advantages in a wide range of decision-making applications under uncertainty. Recently, their efficacy has been extended to multi-period settings. Current approaches model uncertainty either…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-23 Omid Nohadani , Kartikey Sharma

Stochastic collocation (SC) is a well-known non-intrusive method of constructing surrogate models for uncertainty quantification. In dynamical systems, SC is especially suited for full-field uncertainty propagation that characterizes the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-10-18 Saibal De , Reese E. Jones , Hemanth Kolla

We propose a general framework for machine learning based optimization under uncertainty. Our approach replaces the complex forward model by a surrogate, which is learned simultaneously in a one-shot sense when solving the optimal control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-25 Philipp A. Guth , Claudia Schillings , Simon Weissmann

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Predictive uncertainty-a model's self awareness regarding its accuracy on an input-is key for both building robust models via training interventions and for test-time applications such as selective classification. We propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Nishant Jain , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Pradeep Shenoy

The efficacy of robust optimization spans a variety of settings with uncertainties bounded in predetermined sets. In many applications, uncertainties are affected by decisions and cannot be modeled with current frameworks. This paper takes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-29 Omid Nohadani , Kartikey Sharma