Related papers: ZORMS-LfD: Learning from Demonstrations with Zerot…

Reinforcement learning often suffer from the sparse reward issue in real-world robotics problems. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is an effective way to eliminate this problem, which leverages collected expert data to aid online learning.…

Federated learning heavily relies on distributed gradient descent techniques. In the situation where gradient information is not available, the gradients need to be estimated from zeroth-order information, which typically involves computing…

Zeroth-order optimization addresses problems where gradient information is inaccessible or impractical to compute. While most existing methods rely on first-order approximations, incorporating second-order (curvature) information can, in…

Zero-order optimization techniques are becoming increasingly popular in robotics due to their ability to handle non-differentiable functions and escape local minima. These advantages make them particularly useful for trajectory optimization…

Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is widely used to handle challenging tasks, such as query-based black-box adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning. Various attempts have been made to integrate prior information into the gradient…

The conditional gradient algorithm (also known as the Frank-Wolfe algorithm) has recently regained popularity in the machine learning community due to its projection-free property to solve constrained problems. Although many variants of the…

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular method of reproducing and generalizing robot skills from human-provided demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based LfD method that encodes demonstrations as elastic…

Reduced Order Modelling (ROM) has been widely used to create lower order, computationally inexpensive representations of higher-order dynamical systems. Using these representations, ROMs can efficiently model flow fields while using…

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have enabled robot agents to accomplish complex tasks. Reward Machines (RMs) enhance RL's capability to train policies over extended time horizons by structuring high-level…

We introduce LOREN, a curvature-aware zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Existing ZO methods, which estimate gradients via finite differences using random perturbations, often suffer from…

We consider escaping saddle points of nonconvex problems where only the function evaluations can be accessed. Although a variety of works have been proposed, the majority of them require either second or first-order information, and only a…

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…

Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) provides a promising avenue for automating the complex design of deep learning (DL) models. However, current differentiable NAS methods often face constraints in efficiency, operation…

We present a novel Learning from Demonstration (LfD) method, Deformable Manipulation from Demonstrations (DMfD), to solve deformable manipulation tasks using states or images as inputs, given expert demonstrations. Our method uses…

Learning a stable Linear Dynamical System (LDS) from data involves creating models that both minimize reconstruction error and enforce stability of the learned representation. We propose a novel algorithm for learning stable LDSs. Using a…

Reinforcement Learning has been able to solve many complicated robotics tasks without any need for feature engineering in an end-to-end fashion. However, learning the optimal policy directly from the sensory inputs, i.e the observations,…

Reduced order modeling methods are often used as a mean to reduce simulation costs in industrial applications. Despite their computational advantages, reduced order models (ROMs) often fail to accurately reproduce complex dynamics…

Deep learning-based reduced order models (DL-ROMs) have been recently proposed to overcome common limitations shared by conventional reduced order models (ROMs) - built, e.g., through proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) - when applied to…