arXiv research

The paper extends Stone duality to topological convexity spaces.

This paper proposes a general duality framework for the problem of minimizing a convex integral functional over a space of stochastic processes adapted to a given filtration. The framework unifies many well-known duality frameworks from operations research and mathematical finance. The unification allows the extension …

We study the convex duality method for robust utility maximization in the presence of a random endowment. When the underlying price process is a locally bounded semimartingale, we show that the fundamental duality relation holds true for a wide class of utility functions on the whole real line and unbounded random endo…

We develop a general theory of convex duality for certain singular control problems, taking the abstract results by Kramkov and Schachermayer (1999) for optimal expected utility from nonnegative random variables to the level of optimal expected utility from increasing, adapted controls. The main contributions are the f…

A general duality proof for Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization.

Several recently proposed architectures of neural networks such as ResNeXt, Inception, Xception, SqueezeNet and Wide ResNet are based on the designing idea of having multiple branches and have demonstrated improved performance in many applications. We show that one cause for such success is due to the fact that the mul…

We review basic concepts of convex duality, focusing on the very general and supremely useful Fenchel-Rockafellar duality. We summarize how this duality may be applied to a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) settings, including policy evaluation or optimization, online or offline learning, and discounted or undisco…

Paper studies convex risk measures linked to optimization.

We define a class of L-convex-concave subsets of $\Bbb{R}P^n$, where L is a projective subspace of dimension l in $\Bbb{R}P^n$. These are sets whose sections by any (l+1)-dimensional space L' containing L are convex and concavely depend on L'. We introduce an L-duality for these sets, and prove that the L-dual to an L-…

New space for valuations in non-Archimedean setting with duality properties.

We analyze deep neural networks using convex duality to reveal hidden layer structures.

Wasserstein GANs are shown to have hidden convexity, enabling exact solutions with convex optimization.

Optimal risk sharing without convex preferences using aggregate convexity.

Convex duality for two two different super--replication problems in a continuous time financial market with proportional transaction cost is proved. In this market, static hedging in a finite number of options, in addition to usual dynamic hedging with the underlying stock, are allowed. The first one the problems consi…

This work studies the strong duality of non-convex matrix factorization problems: we show that under certain dual conditions, these problems and its dual have the same optimum. This has been well understood for convex optimization, but little was known for non-convex problems. We propose a novel analytical framework an…

Develops exact convex optimization formulations for neural networks.

New method calculates super-hedging prices with transaction costs.

Study collective pricing and hedging with admissible risk exchanges forming a finitely generated convex cone.

In this paper, we study a constrained utility maximization problem following the convex duality approach. After formulating the primal and dual problems, we construct the necessary and sufficient conditions for both the primal and dual problems in terms of FBSDEs plus additional conditions. Such formulation then allows…

Study optimal portfolio management with periodic evaluations in stochastic models, considering convex constraints.

DGKIP extends KIP for dataset distillation without bi-level optimization.

The paper explores how duality applies to reinforcement learning.

We consider an investor with constant absolute risk aversion who trades a risky asset with general Ito dynamics, in the presence of small proportional transaction costs. Kallsen and Muhle-Karbe (2012) formally derived the leading-order optimal trading policy and the associated welfare impact of transaction costs. In th…

Polynomial-time convex optimization for CNNs with ReLU activations.

We study the Dirichlet problem for fully nonlinear, degenerate elliptic equations of the form f(Hess, u)=0 on a smoothly bounded domain D in R^n. In our approach the equation is replaced by a subset F of the space of symmetric nxn-matrices, with bdy(F) contined in the set {f=0}. We establish the existence and uniquenes…

New method for pricing financial products without no-arbitrage condition.

Reward suffices for convex MDPs, expanding RL to new problems.

In this article we dwell into the class of so called ill posed Linear Inverse Problems (LIP) in machine learning, which has become almost a classic in recent times. The fundamental task in an LIP is to recover the entire signal / data from its relatively few random linear measurements. Such problems arise in variety of…

Given a convex optimization problem and its dual, there are many possible first-order algorithms. In this paper, we show the equivalence between mirror descent algorithms and algorithms generalizing the conditional gradient method. This is done through convex duality, and implies notably that for certain problems, such…

We consider the composition optimization with two expected-value functions in the form of $\frac{1}{n}\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^n F_i(\frac{1}{m}\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^m G_j(x))+R(x)$, { which formulates many important problems in statistical learning and machine learning such as solving Bellman equations in reinforcement l…

The paper extends positivity results from vector bundles to Kobayashi positive ones.

Paper tackles fast convergence for non-convex strongly-concave min-max problems.

Generative adversarial network (GAN) is a minimax game between a generator mimicking the true model and a discriminator distinguishing the samples produced by the generator from the real training samples. Given an unconstrained discriminator able to approximate any function, this game reduces to finding the generative …

In this paper we generalize the framework of the feasible descent method (FDM) to a randomized (R-FDM) and a coordinate-wise random feasible descent method (RC-FDM) framework. We show that the famous SDCA algorithm for optimizing the SVM dual problem, or the stochastic coordinate descent method for the LASSO problem, f…

Paper analyzes complexity of PSGLA for sampling log-concave distributions.

Signal processing is rich in inherently continuous and often nonlinear applications, such as spectral estimation, optical imaging, and super-resolution microscopy, in which sparsity plays a key role in obtaining state-of-the-art results. Coping with the infinite dimensionality and non-convexity of these problems typica…

Study on curvature measures in non-Euclidean spaces linked to Euclidean geometry.

This paper introduces a novel monotone curve estimation framework based on convex duality.

In spite of the growing consideration for optimal execution in the financial mathematics literature, numerical approximations of optimal trading curves are almost never discussed. In this article, we present a numerical method to approximate the optimal strategy of a trader willing to unwind a large portfolio. The meth…

This paper studies convex duality in optimal investment and contingent claim valuation in markets where traded assets may be subject to nonlinear trading costs and portfolio constraints. Under fairly general conditions, the dual expressions decompose into tree terms, corresponding to the agent's risk preferences, tradi…

We consider the pricing problem facing a seller of a contingent claim. We assume that this seller has some general level of partial information, and that he is not allowed to sell short in certain assets. This pricing problem, which is our primal problem, is a constrained stochastic optimization problem. We derive a du…

Recently the authors showed that there is a robust potential theory attached to any calibrated manifold (X,φ). In particular, on X there exist φ-plurisubharmonic functions, φ-convex domains, φ-convex boundaries, etc., all inter-related and having a number of good properties. In this paper we show that, in a strong sens…

In this note, we study the utility maximization problem on the terminal wealth under proportional transaction costs and bounded random endowment. In particular, we restrict ourselves to the numéraire-based model and work with utility functions only supporting R+. Under the assumption of existence of consistent price sy…

In this paper we give a new proof of a theorem by Alexandrov on the Gauss curvature prescription of Euclidean convex sets. This proof is based on the duality theory of convex sets and on optimal mass transport. A noteworthy property of this proof is that it does not rely neither on the theory of convex polyhedra nor on…

We study a robust maximization problem from terminal wealth and consumption under a convex constraints on the portfolio. We state the existence and the uniqueness of the consumption-investment strategy by studying the associated quadratic backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE in short). We characterize the op…

Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) is a class of projected gradient descent methods for optimizing sparsity-constrained minimization models, with the best known efficiency and scalability in practice. As far as we know, the existing IHT-style methods are designed for sparse minimization in primal form. It remains open t…

Unified geometric approach to quantum indeterminacy.

In this paper we derive robust super- and subhedging dualities for contingent claims that can depend on several underlying assets. In addition to strict super- and subhedging, we also consider relaxed versions which, instead of eliminating the shortfall risk completely, aim to reduce it to an acceptable level. This yie…