Related papers: A Gauss-Newton Method for Markov Decision Processe…
In this paper, a globally convergent Newton-type proximal gradient method is developed for composite multi-objective optimization problems where each objective function can be represented as the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth…
In this paper, we consider the finite-state approximation of a discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) under the discounted and average cost criteria. Using the linear programming formulation of the constrained discounted…
Motivated by recent advances in serverless cloud computing, in particular the "function as a service" (FaaS) model, we consider the problem of minimizing a convex function in a massively parallel fashion, where communication between workers…
We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based…
We consider concave minimization problems over non-convex sets.Optimization problems with this structure arise in sparse principal component analysis. We analyze both a gradient projection algorithm and an approximate Newton algorithm where…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods have been proposed for scaling up Monte Carlo computations to large data problems. Whilst these approaches have proven useful in many applications, vanilla SG-MCMC…
Quasi-Newton methods are widely used in practise for convex loss minimization problems. These methods exhibit good empirical performance on a wide variety of tasks and enjoy super-linear convergence to the optimal solution. For large-scale…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on…
Policy iteration enjoys a local quadratic rate of contraction, but its iterations are computationally expensive for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a large number of states. In light of the connection between policy iteration and the…
We propose a trust region method for policy optimization that employs Quasi-Newton approximation for the Hessian, called Quasi-Newton Trust Region Policy Optimization QNTRPO. Gradient descent is the de facto algorithm for reinforcement…
We present a new geometric interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a natural normalization procedure that allows us to adjust the value function at each state without altering the advantage of any action with respect to any…
This paper proposes new proximal Newton-type methods with a diagonal metric for solving composite optimization problems whose objective function is the sum of a twice continuously differentiable function and a proper closed directionally…
This paper proposes several novel optimization algorithms for minimizing a nonlinear objective function. The algorithms are enlightened by the optimal state trajectory of an optimal control problem closely related to the minimized objective…
For solving large-scale non-convex problems, we propose inexact variants of trust region and adaptive cubic regularization methods, which, to increase efficiency, incorporate various approximations. In particular, in addition to approximate…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
We consider distributed optimization problems where networked nodes cooperatively minimize the sum of their locally known convex costs. A popular class of methods to solve these problems are the distributed gradient methods, which are…
The present work deals with an improved back-propagation algorithm based on Gauss-Newton numerical optimization method for fast convergence. The steepest descent method is used for the back-propagation. The algorithm is tested using various…
Multi-model Markov decision process (MMDP) is a promising framework for computing policies that are robust to parameter uncertainty in MDPs. MMDPs aim to find a policy that maximizes the expected return over a distribution of MDP models.…
We develop a qualitative theory of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially Observable MDPs that can be used to model sequential decision making tasks when only qualitative information is available. Our approach is based upon an…
Following early work on Hessian-free methods for deep learning, we study a stochastic generalized Gauss-Newton method (SGN) for training DNNs. SGN is a second-order optimization method, with efficient iterations, that we demonstrate to…