Related papers: Rate of Convergence and Error Bounds for LSTD($\la…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
This work studies the theoretical rules of feature selection in linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and a new feature selection method is proposed for sparse linear discriminant analysis. An $l_1$ minimization method is used to select the…
We consider large linear and nonlinear fixed point problems, and solution with proximal algorithms. We show that there is a close connection between two seemingly different types of methods from distinct fields: 1) Proximal iterations for…
Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…
Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is an important classification tool in statistics and machine learning. This paper investigates the varying coefficient LDA model for dynamic data, with Bayes' discriminant direction being a function of…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating latent variable models with arbitrarily corrupted samples in high dimensional space ({\em i.e.,} $d\gg n$) where the underlying parameter is assumed to be sparse. Specifically, we propose a…
This paper is concerned with the ordered statistic decoding with local constraints (LC-OSD) of binary linear block codes, which is a near maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm. Compared with the conventional OSD, the LC-OSD significantly…
We study the fundamental problem of high-dimensional mean estimation in a robust model where a constant fraction of the samples are adversarially corrupted. Recent work gave the first polynomial time algorithms for this problem with…
Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…
We investigate Bayesian non-parametric inference of the $\Lambda$-measure of $\Lambda$-coalescent processes with recurrent mutation, parametrised by probability measures on the unit interval. We give verifiable criteria on the prior for…
The sharpest known high probability generalization bounds for uniformly stable algorithms (Feldman, Vondr\'{a}k, 2018, 2019), (Bousquet, Klochkov, Zhivotovskiy, 2020) contain a generally inevitable sampling error term of order…
We study stochastic approximation procedures for approximately solving a $d$-dimensional linear fixed point equation based on observing a trajectory of length $n$ from an ergodic Markov chain. We first exhibit a non-asymptotic bound of the…
We introduce the notion of consistent error bound functions which provides a unifying framework for error bounds for multiple convex sets. This framework goes beyond the classical Lipschitzian and H\"olderian error bounds and includes…
A recent line of works, initiated by Russo and Xu, has shown that the generalization error of a learning algorithm can be upper bounded by information measures. In most of the relevant works, the convergence rate of the expected…
This work studies the planning problem for robotic systems under both quantifiable and unquantifiable uncertainty. The objective is to enable the robotic systems to optimally fulfill high-level tasks specified by Linear Temporal Logic (LTL)…
We study the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation and present efficient and practical algorithms that come with strong optimality guarantees. We begin by proving lower bounds that establish baselines on both the…
Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation (linear TD) is a classic and powerful prediction algorithm in reinforcement learning. While it is well-understood that linear TD converges almost surely to a unique point,…
This paper analyses a $(1,\lambda)$-Evolution Strategy, a randomised comparison-based adaptive search algorithm, on a simple constraint optimisation problem. The algorithm uses resampling to handle the constraint and optimizes a linear…
We introduce Bayesian least-squares policy iteration (BLSPI), an off-policy, model-free, policy iteration algorithm that uses the Bayesian least-squares temporal-difference (BLSTD) learning algorithm to evaluate policies. An online variant…
In this paper, we analyze the two time-scale stochastic approximation (TTSSA) algorithm introduced in Borkar (1997) using a martingale approach. This approach leads to simple sufficient conditions for the iterations to be bounded almost…