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Related papers: Stein Variational Policy Gradient

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In this paper, we propose an infinite-dimensional version of the Stein variational gradient descent (iSVGD) method for solving Bayesian inverse problems. The method can generate approximate samples from posteriors efficiently. Based on the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Junxiong Jia , Peijun Li , Deyu Meng

We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Jiaojiao Fan , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have recently been recognized as a valuable and promising approach to discovering a policy with creditable performance, particularly in the presence of a dynamic environment and estimation errors in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Zhenwei Lin , Chenyu Xue , Qi Deng , Yinyu Ye

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic sampling algorithm that iteratively transports a set of particles to approximate given distributions, based on an efficient gradient-based update that guarantees to optimally…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Qiang Liu

Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-09-01 Liang Yan , Tao Zhou

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-20 Alex Leviyev , Joshua Chen , Yifei Wang , Omar Ghattas , Aaron Zimmerman

Many Imitation and Reinforcement Learning approaches rely on the availability of expert-generated demonstrations for learning policies or value functions from data. Obtaining a reliable distribution of trajectories from motion planners is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Alexander Lambert , Byron Boots

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm PPG (Proximal Policy Gradient), which is close to both VPG (vanilla policy gradient) and PPO (proximal policy optimization). The PPG objective is a partial variation of the VPG objective and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Ju-Seung Byun , Byungmoon Kim , Huamin Wang

We propose a novel particle-based variational inference method designed to work with multimodal distributions. Our approach, referred to as Branched Stein Variational Gradient Descent (BSVGD), extends the classical Stein Variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Isaías Bañales , Arturo Jaramillo , Joshué Helí Ricalde-Guerrero

Stock portfolio optimization is the process of continuous reallocation of funds to a selection of stocks. This is a particularly well-suited problem for reinforcement learning, as daily rewards are compounding and objective functions may…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2022-07-06 Charl Maree , Christian W. Omlin

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a recently proposed particle-based Bayesian inference method, which has attracted a lot of interest due to its remarkable approximation ability and particle efficiency compared to traditional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-11 Jingwei Zhuo , Chang Liu , Jiaxin Shi , Jun Zhu , Ning Chen , Bo Zhang

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

We present and analyze several strategies for improving the performance of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods. We first show that the convergence rate of these methods can be preserved under a decreasing sequence of errors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-06 Reza Babanezhad , Mohamed Osama Ahmed , Alim Virani , Mark Schmidt , Jakub Konečný , Scott Sallinen

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Matteo Papini , Giorgio Manganini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Stochastic optimization algorithms, particularly stochastic policy gradient (SPG), report significant success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, up to now, that how to speedily acquire an optimal solution for RL is still a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Haobin Zhang , Zhuang Yang

We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-26 Jun Han , Qiang Liu