Related papers: Efficient Constraint Generation for Stochastic Sho…

We propose a new formulation of optimal motion planning (OMP) algorithm for robots operating in a hazardous environment, called adaptive Gaussian-process based stochastic trajectory optimization (AGP-STO). It first restarts the accelerated…

We present a new heuristic point-to-point routing algorithm based on contraction hierarchies (CH). Given an epsilon >= 0, we can prove that the length of the path computed by our algorithm is at most (1+epsilon) times the length of the…

The Capacitated Lot-Sizing Problem (CLSP) and its variants are important and challenging optimization problems. Constructive heuristics are known to be the most intuitive and fastest methods for finding good feasible solutions for the CLSPs…

We study the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem with a linear mixture transition kernel, where an agent repeatedly interacts with a stochastic environment and seeks to reach certain goal state while minimizing the cumulative cost.…

Following the recent resurgence in establishing linear control theoretic benchmarks for reinforcement leaning (RL)-based policy optimization (PO) for complex dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces, an optimal control…

Recently, hybrid metaheuristics have become a trend in operations research. A successful example combines the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures (GRASP) and data mining techniques, where frequent patterns found in high-quality…

We study the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem in which an agent has to reach a goal state in minimum total expected cost. In the learning formulation of the problem, the agent has no prior knowledge about the costs and dynamics of the…

A major bottleneck in scenario-based Sample Average Approximation (SAA) for stochastic programming (SP) is the cost of solving an exact second-stage problem for every scenario, especially when each scenario contains an NP-hard combinatorial…

The recent end-to-end neural solvers have shown promise for small-scale routing problems but suffered from limited real-time scaling-up performance. This paper proposes GLOP (Global and Local Optimization Policies), a unified hierarchical…

The Container Relocation Problem (CRP) is concerned with finding a sequence of moves of containers that minimizes the number of relocations needed to retrieve all containers, while respecting a given order of retrieval. However, the…

Feature selection is an important preprocessing step in machine learning and data mining. In real-world applications, costs, including money, time and other resources, are required to acquire the features. In some cases, there is a test…

We consider the problem of Cost-Aware Learning, where sampling different component functions of a finite-sum objective incurs different costs. The objective is to reach a target error while minimizing the total cost. First, we propose the…

We propose the k-Shortest-Path (k-SP) constraint: a novel constraint on the agent's trajectory that improves the sample efficiency in sparse-reward MDPs. We show that any optimal policy necessarily satisfies the k-SP constraint. Notably,…

We developed a corporative stochastic approximation (CSA) type algorithm for semi-infinite programming (SIP), where the cut generation problem is solved inexactly. First, we provide general error bounds for inexact CSA. Then, we propose two…

Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…

We introduce a stochastic version of the cutting-plane method for a large class of data-driven Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization (MINLO) problems. We show that under very weak assumptions the stochastic algorithm is able to converge to…

Motion planning is the core problem to solve for developing any application involving an autonomous mobile robot. The fundamental motion planning problem involves generating a trajectory for a robot for point-to-point navigation while…

We study a risk-constrained version of the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem, where the risk measure considered is Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We propose two algorithms that obtain a locally risk-optimal policy by employing four…

Backtracking search algorithms are often used to solve the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). The efficiency of backtracking search depends greatly on the variable ordering heuristics. Currently, the most commonly used heuristics are…

We propose a new approach to solve optimal stopping problems via simulation. Working within the backward dynamic programming/Snell envelope framework, we augment the methodology of Longstaff-Schwartz that focuses on approximating the…