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With the goal to provide absolute lower bounds for the best possible running times that can be achieved by $(1+\lambda)$-type search heuristics on common benchmark problems, we recently suggested a dynamic programming approach that computes…
This article presents a dynamic regret analysis for stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) in linear systems with quadratic performance index and additive and multiplicative uncertainties. Under a finite support assumption, the problem…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
We study the evolution of distributions under the action of an ergodic dynamical system, which may be stochastic in nature. By employing tools from Koopman and transfer operator theory one can evolve any initial distribution of the state…
We consider the general class of time-homogeneous stochastic dynamical systems, both discrete and continuous, and study the problem of learning a representation of the state that faithfully captures its dynamics. This is instrumental to…
Generalising the idea of the classical EM algorithm that is widely used for computing maximum likelihood estimates, we propose an EM-Control (EM-C) algorithm for solving multi-period finite time horizon stochastic control problems. The new…
We consider the revenue management problem of finding profit-maximising prices for delivery time slots in the context of attended home delivery. This multi-stage optimal control problem admits a dynamic programming formulation that is…
A new algorithm named EXPected Similarity Estimation (EXPoSE) was recently proposed to solve the problem of large-scale anomaly detection. It is a non-parametric and distribution free kernel method based on the Hilbert space embedding of…
We introduce a new Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) model for simulating price evolution in an artificial financial market, based on a multilayer network of traders. The model also implements, in a quite realistic way with respect to…
Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…
Reinforcement learning can acquire complex behaviors from high-level specifications. However, defining a cost function that can be optimized effectively and encodes the correct task is challenging in practice. We explore how inverse optimal…
We consider the stochastic optimal control problem of nonlinear mean-field systems in discrete time. We reformulate the problem into a deterministic control problem with marginal distribution as controlled state variable, and prove that…
In this paper, a sampling-based Stochastic Model Predictive Control algorithm is proposed for discrete-time linear systems subject to both parametric uncertainties and additive disturbances. One of the main drivers for the development of…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…
In the Monte Carlo (MC) method statistical noise is usually present. Statistical noise may become dominant in the calculation of a distribution, usually by iteration, but is less Important in calculating integrals. The subject of the…
This paper studies an optimal control problem for continuous-time stochastic systems subject to reachability objectives specified in a subclass of metric interval temporal logic specifications, a temporal logic with real-time constraints.…
Learning-based control algorithms require data collection with abundant supervision for training. Safe exploration algorithms ensure the safety of this data collection process even when only partial knowledge is available. We present a new…
A constrained version of the online convex optimization (OCO) problem is considered. With slotted time, for each slot, first an action is chosen. Subsequently the loss function and the constraint violation penalty evaluated at the chosen…
Stochastic Optimization (SO) is a classical approach for optimization under uncertainty that typically requires knowledge about the probability distribution of uncertain parameters. As the latter is often unknown, Distributionally Robust…