ICON Seminar in Learning: Prof. Na Li (Harvard)

The recent explosion of data from our physical world has stimulated active research in learning, optimization, and control. Though learning and control have their own evolutionary paths, they have interplayed with each other in the past and now. In this talk, we will discuss the synergy between learning and control centering around zeroth-order optimization methods. Firstly, we will talk about how the learning method, zeroth-order optimization, could be used in model-free optimal control in (multiagent) dynamical systems. We will also discuss the optimization landscape of the optimal control for partially observed systems, which is crucial for the success of such learning methods. Then, we will shift our focus to study how control tools such as high and low pass filters could help reduce the variance of zeroth-order learning method and speed up its learning speed.

 

Joint work with Yujie Tang, Yingying Li, Xin Chen, and Yang Zheng.

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