Related papers: Stochastic Variance Reduction for Policy Gradient …
The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…
Recently, research on accelerated stochastic gradient descent methods (e.g., SVRG) has made exciting progress (e.g., linear convergence for strongly convex problems). However, the best-known methods (e.g., Katyusha) requires at least two…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…
Stochastic Gradient Boosting (SGB) is a widely used approach to regularization of boosting models based on decision trees. It was shown that, in many cases, random sampling at each iteration can lead to better generalization performance of…
In this paper, we propose World Model Policy Gradient (WMPG), an approach to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimates using learned world models (WM's). In WMPG, a WM is trained online and used to imagine trajectories. The imagined…
Variance reduction (VR) methods boost the performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by enabling the use of larger, constant stepsizes and preserving linear convergence rates. However, current variance reduced SGD methods require…
Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…
Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) is a recent reinforcement learning framework whose success has been supported by various empirical studies. It relies on the key idea of replacing the expected return with the return distribution,…
In large-scale time series forecasting, one often encounters the situation where the temporal patterns of time series, while drifting over time, differ from one another in the same dataset. In this paper, we provably show under such…
We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…
Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…
Due to the high variance of policy gradients, on-policy optimization algorithms are plagued with low sample efficiency. In this work, we propose Augment-Reinforce-Merge (ARM) policy gradient estimator as an unbiased low-variance alternative…
Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) depends critically on how learning rates are tuned and decreased over time. We propose a method to automatically adjust multiple learning rates so as to minimize the expected error at any…
Stochastic variance reduction has proven effective at accelerating first-order algorithms for solving convex finite-sum optimization tasks such as empirical risk minimization. Incorporating second-order information has proven helpful in…
Policy gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms coupled with neural networks have shown success in learning complex policies in the model free continuous action space control setting. However, explicitly parameterized policies are…
Stochastic gradient descent updates parameters with summation gradient computed from a random data batch. This summation will lead to unbalanced training process if the data we obtained is unbalanced. To address this issue, this paper takes…
Despite their success, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance of the gradient estimate, which can result in unsatisfactory sample complexity. Recently, numerous variance-reduced extensions of policy gradient methods with provably…