English
Related papers

Related papers: Probability Functional Descent: A Unifying Perspec…

200 papers

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

We propose a novel probabilistic dimensionality reduction framework that can naturally integrate the generative model and the locality information of data. Based on this framework, we present a new model, which is able to learn a smooth…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-10-18 Li Wang

We consider the problem of generalization in reinforcement learning where visual aspects of the observations might differ, e.g. when there are different backgrounds or change in contrast, brightness, etc. We assume that our agent has access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Bonnie Li , Vincent François-Lavet , Thang Doan , Joelle Pineau

Bayesian inference in function space has gained attention due to its robustness against overparameterization in neural networks. However, approximating the infinite-dimensional function space introduces several challenges. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Sophie Steger , Christian Knoll , Bernhard Klein , Holger Fröning , Franz Pernkopf

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

We take a closer look at some theoretical challenges of Machine Learning as a function approximation, gradient descent as the default optimization algorithm, limitations of fixed length and width networks and a different approach to RNNs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-06 Yarema Boryshchak

One-class recognition is traditionally approached either as a representation learning problem or a feature modeling problem. In this work, we argue that both of these approaches have their own limitations; and a more effective solution can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Pramuditha Perera , Vishal Patel

Federated learning (FL) is a paradigm where many clients collaboratively train a model under the coordination of a central server, while keeping the training data locally stored. However, heterogeneous data distributions over different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Yaqi Sun , Shijing Si , Jianzong Wang , Yuhan Dong , Zhitao Zhu , Jing Xiao

We develop a system-theoretic framework for the structured analysis of distributed optimization algorithms with decomposable cost functions. We model such algorithms as a network of interacting dynamical systems and derive tests for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Aron Karakai , Jaap Eising , Andrea Martinelli , Florian Dörfler

Training neural networks on randomly generated artificial datasets yields Bayesian models that capture the prior defined by the dataset-generating distribution. Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFNs) are a class of methods designed to leverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Samuel Müller , Arik Reuter , Noah Hollmann , David Rügamer , Frank Hutter

Federated reinforcement learning typically aggregates value functions or policies by parameter averaging, which emphasizes expected return and can obscure statistical multimodality and tail behavior that matter in safety-critical settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 David Millard , Cecilia Alm , Rashid Ali , Pengcheng Shi , Ali Baheri

Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

We study the convergence of a variant of distributed gradient descent (DGD) on a distributed low-rank matrix approximation problem wherein some optimization variables are used for consensus (as in classical DGD) and some optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-27 Zhihui Zhu , Qiuwei Li , Xinshuo Yang , Gongguo Tang , Michael B. Wakin

Neural networks have achieved remarkable empirical performance, while the current theoretical analysis is not adequate for understanding their success, e.g., the Neural Tangent Kernel approach fails to capture their key feature learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Yingyu Liang

The choice of activation function can significantly influence the performance of neural networks. The lack of guiding principles for the selection of activation function is lamentable. We try to address this issue by introducing our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Yiwei Li , Enzhi Li

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yulai Zhao , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Jason D. Lee

In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

Policy evaluation with linear function approximation is an important problem in reinforcement learning. When facing high-dimensional feature spaces, such a problem becomes extremely hard considering the computation efficiency and quality of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Haifang Li , Yingce Xia , Wensheng Zhang

Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many decision-making tasks, and traditional reinforcement learning algorithms are mainly designed for obtaining a single optimal solution. However, recent works show the importance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Fanqi Lin , Shiyu Huang , Weiwei Tu

Federated learning is a distributed, privacy-aware learning scenario which trains a single model on data belonging to several clients. Each client trains a local model on its data and the local models are then aggregated by a central party.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Hesham Mostafa