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Related papers: Stochastic Variance-Reduced Policy Gradient

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We propose two policy gradient algorithms for solving the problem of control in an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) context. Both algorithms incorporate a smoothed functional (SF) based gradient estimation scheme. The first algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Policy Gradient (STORM-PG), which operates a SARAH-type stochastic recursive variance-reduced policy gradient in an exponential moving average fashion.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-10 Huizhuo Yuan , Xiangru Lian , Ji Liu , Yuren Zhou

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved human-level performance on a variety of real-world applications. However, the current algorithms still suffer from poor gradient estimation with excessive variance, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Wei-Ye Zhao , Xi-Ya Guan , Yang Liu , Xiaoming Zhao , Jian Peng

The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Blossom Metevier , Philip S. Thomas

In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG), where hereafter we refer to as the variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Different from the choices of the snapshot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Fanhua Shang

Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Pulkit Katdare , Anant Joshi , Katherine Driggs-Campbell

In recent years, stochastic variance reduction algorithms have attracted considerable attention for minimizing the average of a large but finite number of loss functions. This paper proposes a novel Riemannian extension of the Euclidean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Hiroyuki Sato , Hiroyuki Kasai , Bamdev Mishra

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is a classical optimization method. Although it is theoretically proved to have better convergence performance than stochastic gradient descent (SGD), the generalization performance of SVRG…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-20 Hao Jin , Dachao Lin , Zhihua Zhang

We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Sashank J. Reddi , Ahmed Hefny , Suvrit Sra , Barnabás Póczos , Alex Smola

In this paper, we introduce a policy-gradient method for model-based reinforcement learning (RL) that exploits a type of stationary distributions commonly obtained from Markov decision processes (MDPs) in stochastic networks, queueing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Céline Comte , Matthieu Jonckheere , Jaron Sanders , Albert Senen-Cerda

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

Several useful variance-reduced stochastic gradient algorithms, such as SVRG, SAGA, Finito, and SAG, have been proposed to minimize empirical risks with linear convergence properties to the exact minimizer. The existing convergence results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-19 Bicheng Ying , Kun Yuan , Ali H. Sayed

We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Haoxuan Pan , Deheng Ye , Xiaoming Duan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Jianping He , Mingfei Sun

We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Qiuhao Wang , Shaohang Xu , Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik

In this paper we apply the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) method, which is a popular variance reduction method in optimization for accelerating the stochastic gradient method, to solve large scale linear ill-posed systems in…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-03-20 Qinian Jin , Liuhong Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Fanhua Shang , Kaiwen Zhou , Hongying Liu , James Cheng , Ivor W. Tsang , Lijun Zhang , Dacheng Tao , Licheng Jiao

We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Yuchen Fang , Xinshou Zheng , Javad Lavaei

Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL). Under a generative sampling model, these methods can achieve sharper sample complexity than policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Zhichao Jia , Guanghui Lan

This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Jinchi Chen , Jie Feng , Weiguo Gao , Ke Wei

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ziheng Cheng , Xin Guo , Yufei Zhang