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In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Lie He , Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan

This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Brandon Trabucco , Albert Qu , Simon Li , Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan

Distributed model predictive control methods for uncertain systems often suffer from considerable conservatism and can tolerate only small uncertainties due to the use of robust formulations that are amenable to distributed design and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-03 Simon Muntwiler , Kim P. Wabersich , Lukas Hewing , Melanie N. Zeilinger

The paper studies the distributed stochastic compositional optimization problems over networks, where all the agents' inner-level function is the sum of each agent's private expectation function. Focusing on the aggregative structure of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-10 Shengchao Zhao , Yongchao Liu

We present a data-driven algorithm for efficiently computing stochastic control policies for general joint chance constrained optimal control problems. Our approach leverages the theory of kernel distribution embeddings, which allows…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-02-10 Adam J. Thorpe , Thomas Lew , Meeko M. K. Oishi , Marco Pavone

Over the last few years, sampling-based stochastic optimal control (SOC) frameworks have shown impressive performances in reinforcement learning (RL) with applications in robotics. However, such approaches require a large amount of samples…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-12-10 Yunpeng Pan , Evangelos A. Theodorou , Michail Kontitsis

We propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC) with a single-step prediction horizon to approximate the solution of infinite horizon optimal control problems with the expected sum of convex stage costs for constrained linear uncertain systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-24 Eunhyek Joa , Francesco Borrelli

We study high-dimensional stochastic optimal control problems in which many agents cooperate to minimize a convex cost functional. We consider both the full-information problem, in which each agent observes the states of all other agents,…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-01-10 Joe Jackson , Daniel Lacker

Large sectors of the recent optimization literature focused in the last decade on the development of optimal stochastic first order schemes for constrained convex models under progressively relaxed assumptions. Stochastic proximal point is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-05 Andrei Patrascu

This paper establishes a rigorous connection between regularized discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL) and continuous-time stochastic optimal control. Specifically, classical RL algorithms are typically solving a regularized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Huyên Pham , Yuming Paul Zhang , Yuhua Zhu

Recently, there has been a growing interest in distributionally robust optimization (DRO) as a principled approach to data-driven decision making. In this paper, we consider a distributionally robust two-stage stochastic optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-07 Zhe Zhang , Shabbir Ahmed , Guanghui Lan

This paper presents a novel algorithm for solving distribution steering problems featuring nonlinear dynamics and chance constraints. Covariance steering (CS) is an emerging methodology in stochastic optimal control that poses constraints…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Akash Ratheesh , Vincent Pacelli , Augustinos D. Saravanos , Evangelos A. Theodorou

In this paper we consider a parabolic optimal control problem with a Dirac type control with moving point source in two space dimensions. We discretize the problem with piecewise constant functions in time and continuous piecewise linear…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-08-17 Dmitriy Leykekhman , Boris Vexler

We study a Q learning algorithm for continuous time stochastic control problems. The proposed algorithm uses the sampled state process by discretizing the state and control action spaces under piece-wise constant control processes. We show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-10 Erhan Bayraktar , Ali Devran Kara

Probabilistic programming is related to a compositional approach to stochastic modeling by switching from discrete to continuous time dynamics. In continuous time, an operator-algebra semantics is available in which processes proceeding in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-12-05 Eric Mjolsness

We provide an overview on how to use the measurable selection techniques to derive the dynamic programming principle for a general stochastic optimal control/stopping problem. By considering its martingale problem formulation on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-03 Nicole El Karoui , Xiaolu Tan

We prove a general existence result in stochastic optimal control in discrete time where controls take values in conditional metric spaces, and depend on the current state and the information of past decisions through the evolution of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-19 Asgar Jamneshan , Michael Kupper , José Miguel Zapata

In this paper we introduce a class of novel distributed algorithms for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems over directed graphs. In the addressed set-up, the dimension of the decision variable can be extremely high and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-06 Francesco Farina , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Stochastic convex optimization algorithms are the most popular way to train machine learning models on large-scale data. Scaling up the training process of these models is crucial, but the most popular algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Ashok Cutkosky , Robert Busa-Fekete

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 James Cuin , Davide Carbone , Yanbo Tang , O. Deniz Akyildiz