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We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…
A novel multiscale consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithm for solving bi- and tri-level optimization problems is introduced. Existing CBO techniques are generalized by the proposed method through the employment of multiple interacting…
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…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic method for solving equality constrained optimization problems that utilizes predictive variance reduction. Specifically, we develop a method based on the sequential quadratic programming paradigm that…
This paper studies decentralized convex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_x\max_y f(x,y) \triangleq\frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^m f_i(x,y)$, where $m$ is the number of agents and each local function can be written as…
We address the problem of policy selection in contextual stochastic optimization (CSO), where covariates are available as contextual information and decisions must satisfy hard feasibility constraints. In many CSO settings, multiple…
This paper focuses on investigating an inexact stochastic model-based optimization algorithm that integrates preconditioning techniques for solving stochastic composite optimization problems. The proposed framework unifies and extends the…
The optimal control problem of stochastic systems is commonly solved via robust or scenario-based optimization methods, which are both challenging to scale to long optimization horizons. We cast the optimal control problem of a stochastic…
This paper considers an optimization problem for a dynamical system whose evolution depends on a collection of binary decision variables. We develop scalable approximation algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds to provide…
We propose constrained causal Bayesian optimization (cCBO), an approach for finding interventions in a known causal graph that optimize a target variable under some constraints. cCBO first reduces the search space by exploiting the graph…
We consider Bayesian optimization of objective functions of the form $\rho[ F(x, W) ]$, where $F$ is a black-box expensive-to-evaluate function and $\rho$ denotes either the VaR or CVaR risk measure, computed with respect to the randomness…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods are useful for optimizing functions that are expen- sive to evaluate, lack an analytical expression and whose evaluations can be contaminated by noise. These methods rely on a probabilistic model of the…
A sequential quadratic optimization algorithm for minimizing an objective function defined by an expectation subject to nonlinear inequality and equality constraints is proposed, analyzed, and tested. The context of interest is when it is…
We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…
Optimization problems with continuous data appear in, e.g., robust machine learning, functional data analysis, and variational inference. Here, the target function is given as an integral over a family of (continuously) indexed target…
Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…
This paper considers the problem of minimizing a convex expectation function with a set of inequality convex expectation constraints. We present a computable stochastic approximation type algorithm, namely the stochastic linearized proximal…
We consider unconstrained stochastic optimization problems with no available gradient information. Such problems arise in settings from derivative-free simulation optimization to reinforcement learning. We propose an adaptive sampling…
The motivation for this paper stems from the desire to develop an adaptive sampling method for solving constrained optimization problems in which the objective function is stochastic and the constraints are deterministic. The method…
Factor Analysis (FA) is a technique of fundamental importance that is widely used in classical and modern multivariate statistics, psychometrics and econometrics. In this paper, we revisit the classical rank-constrained FA problem, which…