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We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…
Increasing effort is put into the development of methods for learning mechanistic models from data. This task entails not only the accurate estimation of parameters but also a suitable model structure. Recent work on the discovery of…
Existing work on data-driven optimization focuses on problems in static environments, but little attention has been paid to problems in dynamic environments. This paper proposes a data-driven optimization algorithm to deal with the…
Many machine learning models require a training procedure based on running stochastic gradient descent. A key element for the efficiency of those algorithms is the choice of the learning rate schedule. While finding good learning rates…
Traditional analyses of gradient descent optimization show that, when the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian - often referred to as the sharpness - is below a critical learning-rate threshold, then training is 'stable' and training loss…
Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard approach to adapting pretrained knowledge to improve the accuracy on new sparse, imbalance datasets. However, issues arise when optimization falls into a collapsed state, where the model…
Autonomous vehicles must navigate dynamically uncertain environments while balancing safety and efficiency. This challenge is exacerbated by unpredictable human-driven vehicle (HV) behaviors and perception inaccuracies, necessitating…
We consider nonconvex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y\in{\mathcal Y}} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, where $f$ is strongly-concave in $\bf y$ but possibly nonconvex in $\bf x$ and ${\mathcal Y}$ is a convex…
In this paper, training a neural network is identified, exactly, as a search through Hamilton--Jacobi initial-value problems: each gradient step selects the initial data of a viscous Hamilton--Jacobi equation whose Hopf--Cole propagator…
This paper demonstrates a refined approach to solving dynamic optimization problems for underactuated marine surface vessels. To this end the differential flatness of a mathematical model assuming full actuation is exploited to derive an…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
First-order methods with momentum such as Nesterov's fast gradient method are very useful for convex optimization problems, but can exhibit undesirable oscillations yielding slow convergence rates for some applications. An adaptive…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
Training deep neural networks is challenging. To accelerate training and enhance performance, we propose PadamP, a novel optimization algorithm. PadamP is derived by applying the adaptive estimation of the p-th power of the second-order…
Adaptive optimization methods are well known to achieve superior convergence relative to vanilla gradient methods. The traditional viewpoint in optimization, particularly in convex optimization, explains this improved performance by arguing…
In this paper, we study when we might expect the optimization curve induced by gradient descent to be \emph{convex} -- precluding, for example, an initial plateau followed by a sharp decrease, making it difficult to decide when optimization…
Recently, many machine learning optimizers have been analysed considering them as the asymptotic limit of some differential equations when the step size goes to zero. In other words, the optimizers can be seen as a finite difference scheme…
In this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such…
Distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problems have recently received attention due to the growing interest of signal processing, computer vision, and natural language processing communities in applications deployed over…
In this paper, online convex optimization is applied to the problem of controlling linear dynamical systems. An algorithm similar to online gradient descent, which can handle time-varying and unknown cost functions, is proposed. Then,…