Tag Archives: Curse Of Dimensionality

Regression to help in finding the optimal policy in MDPs based on duality theory

April 26, 2018 07:44 ,

H. Zhu, F. Ye and E. Zhou, Solving the Dual Problems of Dynamic Programs via Regression, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 63, no. 5, pp. 1340-1355, DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2017.2747405.

In recent years, information relaxation and duality in dynamic programs have been studied extensively, and the resulted primal-dual approach has become a powerful procedure in solving dynamic programs by providing lower-upper bounds on the optimal value function. Theoretically, with the so-called value-based optimal dual penalty, the optimal value function could be recovered exactly via strong duality. However, in practice, obtaining tight dual bounds usually requires good approximations of the optimal dual penalty, which could be time consuming if analytical computation is not possible and nested simulation has to be used to estimate the conditional expectations inside the dual penalty. In this paper, we will develop a framework of a regression approach to approximating the optimal dual penalty in a nonnested manner, by exploring the structure of the function space consisting of all feasible dual penalties. The resulted approximations maintain to be feasible dual penalties, and thus yielding valid dual bounds on the optimal value function. We show that the proposed framework is computationally efficient, and the resulted dual penalties lead to numerically tractable dual problems. Finally, we apply the framework to a high-dimensional dynamic trading problem to demonstrate its effectiveness in solving the dual problems of complex dynamic programs.

Posted in: Probability and statistics , Tagged: ,

A novel method of mathematical compression of the value function for polynomial (in the state) time complexity of value iteration / policy iteration

March 27, 2018 09:01 ,

Alex Gorodetsky, Sertac Karaman, and Youssef Marzouk, High-dimensional stochastic optimal control using continuous tensor decompositions, The International Journal of Robotics Research Vol 37, Issue 2-3, pp. 340 – 377, DOI: 10.1177/0278364917753994.

Motion planning and control problems are embedded and essential in almost all robotics applications. These problems are often formulated as stochastic optimal control problems and solved using dynamic programming algorithms. Unfortunately, most existing algorithms that guarantee convergence to optimal solutions suffer from the curse of dimensionality: the run time of the algorithm grows exponentially with the dimension of the state space of the system. We propose novel dynamic programming algorithms that alleviate the curse of dimensionality in problems that exhibit certain low-rank structure. The proposed algorithms are based on continuous tensor decompositions recently developed by the authors. Essentially, the algorithms represent high-dimensional functions (e.g. the value function) in a compressed format, and directly perform dynamic programming computations (e.g. value iteration, policy iteration) in this format. Under certain technical assumptions, the new algorithms guarantee convergence towards optimal solutions with arbitrary precision. Furthermore, the run times of the new algorithms scale polynomially with the state dimension and polynomially with the ranks of the value function. This approach realizes substantial computational savings in “compressible” problem instances, where value functions admit low-rank approximations. We demonstrate the new algorithms in a wide range of problems, including a simulated six-dimensional agile quadcopter maneuvering example and a seven-dimensional aircraft perching example. In some of these examples, we estimate computational savings of up to 10 orders of magnitude over standard value iteration algorithms. We further demonstrate the algorithms running in real time on board a quadcopter during a flight experiment under motion capture.

Posted in: Probability and statistics, Robot motion planning , Tagged: , , , ,