Related papers: Regret Analysis of Guided Diffusion for Black-Box …
This paper investigates the regret associated with the Distributionally Robust Control (DRC) strategies used to address multistage optimization problems where the involved probability distributions are not known exactly, but rather are…
For decision making under uncertainty, min-max regret has been established as a popular methodology to find robust solutions. In this approach, we compare the performance of our solution against the best possible performance had we known…
Policy learning in modern operations environments faces a fundamental tension between limited operational data and the large, often continuous, state and action spaces over which good decisions must be identified and deployed. We study…
One way to make decisions under uncertainty is to select an optimal option from a possible range of options, by maximizing the expected utilities derived from a probability model. However, under severe uncertainty, identifying precise…
In practical applications, data is used to make decisions in two steps: estimation and optimization. First, a machine learning model estimates parameters for a structural model relating decisions to outcomes. Second, a decision is chosen to…
Several fundamental problems in science and engineering consist of global optimization tasks involving unknown high-dimensional (black-box) functions that map a set of controllable variables to the outcomes of an expensive experiment.…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely used framework for optimizing expensive black-box functions, commonly based on Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models. Its effectiveness relies on uncertainty quantification that is both sharp…
We propose a novel Bayesian optimization (BO) procedure aimed at identifying the ``profile optima'' of a deterministic black-box computer simulation that has a single control parameter and multiple nuisance parameters. The profile optima…
Online bilevel optimization (OBO) is a powerful framework for machine learning problems where both outer and inner objectives evolve over time, requiring dynamic updates. Current OBO approaches rely on deterministic \textit{window-smoothed}…
We study how to accelerate Bayesian optimization (BO) on a target task by transferring historical knowledge from related source tasks. Existing work on BO with knowledge transfer either lacks theoretical guarantees or achieves the same…
Regret is the cost of uncertainty in algorithmic decision-making. Quantifying regret typically requires computationally expensive simulation via Sample Average Approximation (SAA), with complexity $\mathcal{O}(Bn^{2}d^{3})$ in the number of…
We consider the problem of Bayesian optimization (BO) in one dimension, under a Gaussian process prior and Gaussian sampling noise. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that, under fairly mild technical assumptions on the kernel, the…
This paper investigates the problem of efficient constrained global optimization of hybrid models that are a composition of a known white-box function and an expensive multi-output black-box function subject to noisy observations, which…
Bayesian optimization (BO) iteratively fits a Gaussian process (GP) surrogate to accumulated evaluations and selects new queries via an acquisition function such as expected improvement (EI). In practice, BO often concentrates evaluations…
This paper presents a synthesis method for the generalised dynamic regret problem, comparing the performance of a strictly causal controller to the optimal non-causal controller under a weighted disturbance. This framework encompasses both…
Regret has been widely adopted as the metric of choice for evaluating the performance of online optimization algorithms for distributed, multi-agent systems. However, data/model variations associated with agents can significantly impact…
We consider estimation and control in linear time-varying dynamical systems from the perspective of regret minimization. Unlike most prior work in this area, we focus on the problem of designing causal estimators and controllers which…
We study online learning with bandit feedback (i.e. learner has access to only zeroth-order oracle) where cost/reward functions $\f_t$ admit a "pseudo-1d" structure, i.e. $\f_t(\w) = \loss_t(\pred_t(\w))$ where the output of $\pred_t$ is…
We propose a framework which generalizes "decision making with structured observations" by allowing robust (i.e. multivalued) models. In this framework, each model associates each decision with a convex set of probability distributions over…
Inspired by online learning, data-dependent regret has recently been proposed as a criterion for controller design. In the regret-optimal control paradigm, causal controllers are designed to minimize regret against a hypothetical optimal…