@inproceedings{bib_CGD:_2025, AUTHOR = {Shikhar Saxena, Tejas Bodas, Arti Yardi}, TITLE = {CGD: Modifying the Loss Landscape by Gradient Regularization}, BOOKTITLE = {International Conference on Learning and Intelligent Optimization}. YEAR = {2025}}

Line-search methods are commonly used to solve optimization problems. The simplest line search method is steepest descent where one always moves in the direction of the negative gradient. Newton's method on the other hand is a second-order method that uses the curvature information in the Hessian to pick the descent direction. In this work, we propose a new line-search method called Constrained Gradient Descent (CGD) that implicitly changes the landscape of the objective function for efficient optimization. CGD is formulated as a solution to the constrained version of the original problem where the constraint is on a function of the gradient. We optimize the corresponding Lagrangian function thereby favourably changing the landscape of the objective function. This results in a line search procedure where the Lagrangian penalty acts as a control over the descent direction and can therefore be used to iterate over points that have smaller gradient values, compared to iterates of vanilla steepest descent. We establish global linear convergence rates for CGD and provide numerical experiments on synthetic test functions to illustrate the performance of CGD. We also provide two practical variants of CGD, CGD-FD which is a Hessian free variant and CGD-QN, a quasi-Newton variant and demonstrate their effectiveness.

@inproceedings{bib_Meth_2024, AUTHOR = {Tejas Bodas}, TITLE = {Methods and systems for obtaining end-to-end classification model using mixture density network}, BOOKTITLE = {United States Patent}. YEAR = {2024}}

Methods and systems for obtaining end-to-end classification model using mixture density network

@inproceedings{bib_Load_2023, AUTHOR = {Rooji Jinan, Ajay Badita, Tejas Bodas, Parimal Parag}, TITLE = {Load balancing policies without feedback using timed replicas}, BOOKTITLE = {Performance Evaluation}. YEAR = {2023}}

@inproceedings{bib_Baye_2023, AUTHOR = {Kunal Jain, Prabuchandran K. J., Tejas Bodas}, TITLE = {Bayesian Optimization for Function Compositions with Applications to Dynamic Pricing}, BOOKTITLE = {International Conference on Learning and Intelligent Optimization}. YEAR = {2023}}

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is used to find the global optima of black box functions. In this work, we propose a practical BO method of function compositions where the form of the composition is known but the constituent functions are expensive to evaluate. By assuming an independent Gaussian process (GP) model for each of the constituent black-box function, we propose EI and UCB based BO algorithms and demonstrate their ability to outperform vanilla BO and the current state-of-art algorithms. We demonstrate a novel application of the proposed methods to dynamic pricing in revenue management when the underlying demand function is expensive to evaluate.

@inproceedings{bib_Prac_2023, AUTHOR = {Utkarsh Prakash, Aryan Chollera, Kushagra Khatwani, Prabuchandran K. J, Tejas Bodas}, TITLE = {Practical First-Order Bayesian Optimization Algorithms}, BOOKTITLE = {CODS COMDS}. YEAR = {2023}}

First Order Bayesian Optimization (FOBO) is a sample efficient sequential approach to find the global maxima of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective function by suitably querying for the function and its gradient evaluations. Such methods assume Gaussian process (GP) models for both, the function and its gradient, and use them to construct an acquisition function that identifies the next query point. In this paper, we propose a class of practical FOBO algorithms that efficiently utilizes the information from the gradient GP to identify potential query points with zero gradients. We construct a multi-level acquisition function where in the first step, we optimize a lower level acquisition function with multiple restarts to identify potential query points with zero gradient value. We then use the upper level acquisition function to rank these query points based on their function values to potentially identify the global maxima. As a final step, the potential point of maxima is chosen as the actual query point. We validate the performance of our proposed algorithms on several test functions and show that our algorithms outperform state-of-the-art FOBO algorithms. We also illustrate the application of our algorithms in finding optimal set of hyper-parameters in machine learning and in learning the optimal policy in reinforcement learning tasks.

@inproceedings{bib_Baye_2023, AUTHOR = {Kunal Jain, Prabuchandran K. J, Tejas Bodas}, TITLE = {Bayesian Optimization for Function Compositions with Applications to Dynamic Pricing}, BOOKTITLE = {Technical Report}. YEAR = {2023}}

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is used to find the global optima of black box functions. In this work, we propose a practical BO method of function compositions where the form of the composition is known but the constituent functions are expensive to evaluate. By assuming an independent Gaussian process (GP) model for each of the constituent black-box function, we propose EI and UCB based BO algorithms and demonstrate their ability to outperform vanilla BO and the current state-of-art algorithms. We demonstrate a novel application of the proposed methods to dynamic pricing in revenue management when the underlying demand function is expensive to evaluate.