English
Related papers

Related papers: Backpropagation through the Void: Optimizing contr…

200 papers

In deep learning, it is common to use more network parameters than training points. In such scenarioof over-parameterization, there are usually multiple networks that achieve zero training error so that thetraining algorithm induces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Hung-Hsu Chou , Carsten Gieshoff , Johannes Maly , Holger Rauhut

It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Ronan Keane

In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-06 John Schulman , Nicolas Heess , Theophane Weber , Pieter Abbeel

Tuning hyperparameters of learning algorithms is hard because gradients are usually unavailable. We compute exact gradients of cross-validation performance with respect to all hyperparameters by chaining derivatives backwards through the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-04-03 Dougal Maclaurin , David Duvenaud , Ryan P. Adams

Gradient-based optimization methods are commonly used to identify local optima in high-dimensional spaces. When derivatives cannot be evaluated directly, stochastic estimators can provide approximate gradients. However, these estimators'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Philipp Andelfinger , Wentong Cai

A broad class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms known as "variational algorithms" have been proposed in the context of quantum simulation, machine learning, and combinatorial optimization as a means of potentially achieving a quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-04-09 Aram Harrow , John Napp

Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 João Carvalho , Davide Tateo , Fabio Muratore , Jan Peters

Real-world control systems require policies that are not only high-performing but also interpretable and robust. A promising direction toward this goal is model-based control, which learns system dynamics and cost functions from historical…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-20 Yuexin Bian , Jie Feng , Yuanyuan Shi

Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Andriy Mnih , Danilo J. Rezende

In this paper, we utilize weight gradients from backpropagation to characterize the representation space learned by deep learning algorithms. We demonstrate the utility of such gradients in applications including perceptual image quality…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Gukyeong Kwon , Mohit Prabhushankar , Dogancan Temel , Ghassan AlRegib

Given a set of observations generated by an optimization process, the goal of inverse optimization is to determine likely parameters of that process. We cast inverse optimization as a form of deep learning. Our method, called deep inverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Yingcong Tan , Andrew Delong , Daria Terekhov

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

In this work we introduce the application of black-box quantum control as an interesting rein- forcement learning problem to the machine learning community. We analyze the structure of the reinforcement learning problems arising in quantum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-16 Moritz August , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

We develop an optimization algorithm suitable for Bayesian learning in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates within a general black-box framework for efficient training with limited model-specific derivations. It…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Martin Magris , Mostafa Shabani , Alexandros Iosifidis

Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Jiaxin Shi , Yuhao Zhou , Jessica Hwang , Michalis K. Titsias , Lester Mackey

In this paper, we develop a new optimization framework for the least squares learning problem via fully connected neural networks or physics-informed neural networks. The gradient descent sometimes behaves inefficiently in deep learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Yaru Liu , Yiqi Gu , Michael K. Ng

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Black-box optimization is primarily important for many compute-intensive applications, including reinforcement learning (RL), robot control, etc. This paper presents a novel theoretical framework for black-box optimization, in which our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Yueming Lyu , Ivor W. Tsang

In recent years, solving optimization problems involving black-box simulators has become a point of focus for the machine learning community due to their ubiquity in science and engineering. The simulators describe a forward process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Fabio Valerio Massoli , Tim Bakker , Thomas Hehn , Tribhuvanesh Orekondy , Arash Behboodi

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler