Related papers: Drift Optimization of Regulated Stochastic Models …
Regularization is a widely recognized technique in mathematical optimization. It can be used to smooth out objective functions, refine the feasible solution set, or prevent overfitting in machine learning models. Due to its simplicity and…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
Discrete-time stochastic systems are an essential modelling tool for many engineering systems. We consider stochastic control systems that are evolving over continuous spaces. For this class of models, methods for the formal verification…
This paper proposes AB-SAGA, a first-order distributed stochastic optimization method to minimize a finite-sum of smooth and strongly convex functions distributed over an arbitrary directed graph. AB-SAGA removes the uncertainty caused by…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
We systematically review the Variational Optimization, Variational Inference and Stochastic Search perspectives on sampling-based dynamic optimization and discuss their connections to state-of-the-art optimizers and Stochastic Optimal…
This paper presents a stochastic, model predictive control (MPC) algorithm that leverages short-term probabilistic forecasts for dispatching and rebalancing Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand systems (AMoD, i.e. fleets of self-driving vehicles).…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in system optimization problems when only noisy measurements of the system are available. This paper studies two types of SA algorithms in a multivariate Kiefer-Wolfowitz setting:…
Over the last 20 years significant effort has been dedicated to the development of sampling-based motion planning algorithms such as the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) and its asymptotically optimal version (e.g. RRT*). However,…
In this paper, we consider a class of stochastic optimal control problems with risk constraints that are expressed as bounded probabilities of failure for particular initial states. We present here a martingale approach that diffuses a risk…
This paper presents a robust version of the stratified sampling method when multiple uncertain input models are considered for stochastic simulation. Various variance reduction techniques have demonstrated their superior performance in…
In this paper, we study convex optimization problems where agents of a network cooperatively minimize the global objective function which consists of multiple local objective functions. Different from most of the existing works, the local…
This paper proposes a data-driven control framework to regulate an unknown, stochastic linear dynamical system to the solution of a (stochastic) convex optimization problem. Despite the centrality of this problem, most of the available…
We examine a standard factory scheduling problem with stochastic processing and setup times, minimizing the expectation of the weighted number of tardy jobs. Because the costs of operators in the schedule are stochastic and sequence…
Optimal control of stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems is a major challenge in the domain of robot learning. Given the intractability of the global control problem, state-of-the-art algorithms focus on approximate sequential optimization…
We describe an adaptive importance sampling algorithm for rare events that is based on a dual stochastic control formulation of a path sampling problem. Specifically, we focus on path functionals that have the form of cumulate generating…
Regularization for optimization is a crucial technique to avoid overfitting in machine learning. In order to obtain the best performance, we usually train a model by tuning the regularization parameters. It becomes costly, however, when a…
The sample average approximation (SAA) approach is applied to risk-neutral optimization problems governed by semilinear elliptic partial differential equations with random inputs. After constructing a compact set that contains the SAA…
We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…
One key challenge for solving a general stochastic optimization problem with expectations in the objective and constraint functions using ordinary stochastic iterative methods lies in the infeasibility issue caused by the randomness over…