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Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…
Bayesian optimization (BO) based on Gaussian process models is a powerful paradigm to optimize black-box functions that are expensive to evaluate. While several BO algorithms provably converge to the global optimum of the unknown function,…
Optimal values and solutions of empirical approximations of stochastic optimization problems can be viewed as statistical estimators of their true values. From this perspective, it is important to understand the asymptotic behavior of these…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a widely used approach for blackbox optimization that leverages a Gaussian process (GP) model and an acquisition function to guide future sampling. While effective in low-dimensional settings, BO faces…
Two of the most prominent algorithms for solving unconstrained smooth games are the classical stochastic gradient descent-ascent (SGDA) and the recently introduced stochastic consensus optimization (SCO) [Mescheder et al., 2017]. SGDA is…
Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a meta-heuristic for continuous black-box optimization problems. In this paper we focus on the convergence of the particle swarm, i.e., the exploitation phase of the algorithm. We introduce a new…
Contextual Bayesian optimization (CBO) is a powerful framework for sequential decision-making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in wind energy systems. In this setting, the learner receives context (e.g., weather…
We analyze the stability of general nonlinear discrete-time stochastic systems controlled by optimal inputs that minimize an infinite-horizon discounted cost. Under a novel stochastic formulation of cost-controllability and detectability…
Multi agent consensus algorithms with update steps based on so-called balanced asymmetric chains, are analyzed. For such algorithms it is shown that (i) the set of accumulation points of states is finite, (ii) the asymptotic unconditional…
This study investigates the application of Bayesian Optimization (BO) for the hyperparameter tuning of neural networks, specifically targeting the enhancement of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for image classification tasks. Bayesian…
Convergence of Extremum Seeking (ES) algorithms has been established in the limit of small gains. Using averaging theory and contraction analysis, we propose a framework for computing explicit bounds on the departure of the ES scheme from…
(Stochastic) bilevel optimization is a frequently encountered problem in machine learning with a wide range of applications such as meta-learning, hyper-parameter optimization, and reinforcement learning. Most of the existing studies on…
We investigate a voting scenario with two groups of agents whose preferences depend on a ground truth that cannot be directly observed. The majority's preferences align with the ground truth, while the minorities disagree. Focusing on…
We present distributed algorithms that can be used by multiple agents to align their estimates with a particular value over a network with time-varying connectivity. Our framework is general in that this value can represent a consensus…
The theoretical analysis of spectral clustering mainly focuses on consistency, while there is relatively little research on its generalization performance. In this paper, we study the excess risk bounds of the popular spectral clustering…
We introduce a general mathematical framework for distributed algorithms, and a monotonicity property frequently satisfied in application. These properties are leveraged to provide finite-time guarantees for converging algorithms, suited…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) approximates the trust region update using multiple epochs of clipped SGD. Each epoch may drift further from the natural gradient direction, creating path-dependent noise. To understand this drift, we can…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are widely used for their strong asymptotic performance and training stability, but they struggle to scale with larger batch sizes, as additional parallel environments yield redundant data…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for black-box optimization, which relies on uncertainty as part of its decision-making process when deciding which experiment to perform next. However, not much work has addressed the effect of…
Robustness to distributional shift is one of the key challenges of contemporary machine learning. Attaining such robustness is the goal of distributionally robust optimization, which seeks a solution to an optimization problem that is…