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Optimization seeks extremal points in a function. When there are superextensively many optima, optimization algorithms are liable to get stuck. Under these conditions, generic algorithms tend to find marginal optima, which have many nearly…

Guided policy search algorithms have been proven to work with incredible accuracy for not only controlling a complicated dynamical system, but also learning optimal policies from various unseen instances. One assumes true nature of the…

Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…

The histogram is an analysis tool in widespread use within many sciences, with high energy physics as a prime example. However, there exists an inherent bias in the choice of binning for the histogram, with different choices potentially…

Finding parameters that minimise a loss function is at the core of many machine learning methods. The Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm is widely used and delivers state of the art results for many problems. Nonetheless, Stochastic…

In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic…

The partially observable constrained optimization problems (POCOPs) impede data-driven optimization techniques since an infeasible solution of POCOPs can provide little information about the objective as well as the constraints. We endeavor…

In this investigation, we propose several algorithms to recover the location and intensity of a radiation source located in a simulated 250 m x 180 m block in an urban center based on synthetic measurements. Radioactive decay and detection…

This is a survey on the use of low-degree polynomials to predict and explain the apparent statistical-computational tradeoffs in a variety of average-case computational problems. In a nutshell, this framework measures the complexity of a…

Grover's database search algorithm, although discovered in the context of quantum computation, can be implemented using any physical system that allows superposition of states. A physical realization of this algorithm is described using…

A significant challenge in nature-inspired algorithmics is the identification of specific characteristics of problems that make them harder (or easier) to solve using specific methods. The hope is that, by identifying these characteristics,…

We consider ``one-at-a-time'' coordinate-wise descent algorithms for a class of convex optimization problems. An algorithm of this kind has been proposed for the $L_1$-penalized regression (lasso) in the literature, but it seems to have…

Local search algorithms for combinatorial search problems frequently encounter a sequence of states in which it is impossible to improve the value of the objective function; moves through these regions, called plateau moves, dominate the…

Applying local search algorithms to combinatorial optimization problems is not an easy feat. Typically, human intervention is required to compile the constraints to input data for some metaheuristic algorithm. In this paper, we establish a…

A quantum algorithm for general combinatorial search that uses the underlying structure of the search space to increase the probability of finding a solution is presented. This algorithm shows how coherent quantum systems can be matched to…

The problem of optimizing over random structures emerges in many areas of science and engineering, ranging from statistical physics to machine learning and artificial intelligence. For many such structures finding optimal solutions by means…

The success of deep neural networks hinges on our ability to accurately and efficiently optimize high-dimensional, non-convex functions. In this paper, we empirically investigate the loss functions of state-of-the-art networks, and how…

Linear regression is a fundamental modeling tool in statistics and related fields. In this paper, we study an important variant of linear regression in which the predictor-response pairs are partially mismatched. We use an optimization…

Unconstrained optimization problems are typically solved using iterative methods, which often depend on line search techniques to determine optimal step lengths in each iteration. This paper introduces a novel line search approach.…

In both industrial and service domains, a central benefit of the use of robots is their ability to quickly and reliably execute repetitive tasks. However, even relatively simple peg-in-hole tasks are typically subject to stochastic…