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In this paper, we study a class of zero-sum two-player stochastic differential games with the controlled stochastic differential equations and the payoff/cost functionals of recursive type. As opposed to the pioneering work by Fleming and…
The paper concerns the investigation of nonconvex and nondifferentiable integral functionals on general Banach spaces, which may not be reflexive and/or separable. Considering two major subdifferentials of variational analysis, we derive…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
We consider dynamic programming problems with finite, discrete-time horizons and prohibitively high-dimensional, discrete state-spaces for direct computation of the value function from the Bellman equation. For the case that the value…
The problem of minimizing the difference of two convex functions is called polyhedral d.c. optimization problem if at least one of the two component functions is polyhedral. We characterize the existence of global optimal solutions of…
In this Note, assuming that the generator is uniform Lipschitz in the unknown variables, we relate the solution of a one dimensional backward stochastic differential equation with the value process of a stochastic differential game. Under a…
We study global optimization of non-convex functions through optimal control theory. Our main result establishes that (quasi-)optimal trajectories of a discounted control problem converge globally and practically asymptotically to the set…
In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…
We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…
The recently developed Distributed Block Proximal Method, for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems, is studied in this paper under the assumption of constant stepsizes and strongly convex (possibly non-smooth) local…
We consider a stochastic control problem which is composed of a controlled stochastic differential equation, and whose associated cost functional is defined through a controlled backward stochastic differential equation. Under appropriate…
We consider the problem of rare event importance sampling, where the random variable of interest is a path functional of an It\^o diffusion computed up to the first exit from a $d$-dimensional bounded domain. Dupuis and Wang (\textit{Ann.…
Many problems involve the use of models which learn probability distributions or incorporate randomness in some way. In such problems, because computing the true expected gradient may be intractable, a gradient estimator is used to update…
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…
We study optimal control problems governed by abstract infinite dimensional stochastic differential equations using the dynamic programming approach. In the first part, we prove Lipschitz continuity, semiconcavity and semiconvexity of the…
We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…
We develop stochastic first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems. When the saddle function is strongly convex in the primal variable, we develop the first stochastic restart scheme for this…
The canonical theory of sublinear expectations, a foundation of stochastic calculus under ambiguity, is insensitive to the non-convex geometry of primitive uncertainty models. This paper develops a new stochastic calculus for a structured…
This paper provides new theoretical connections between multi-time Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equations and variational image decomposition models in imaging sciences. We show that the minimal values of these optimization problems…
A bifurcation is a qualitative change in a family of solutions to an equation produced by varying parameters. In contrast to the local bifurcations of dynamical systems that are often related to a change in the number or stability of…