Related papers: Stochastic Variance Reduction for Deep Q-learning

Deep Q-learning algorithms often suffer from poor gradient estimations with an excessive variance, resulting in unstable training and poor sampling efficiency. Stochastic variance-reduced gradient methods such as SVRG have been applied to…

Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG), introduced by Johnson & Zhang (2013), is a theoretically compelling optimization method. However, as Defazio & Bottou (2019) highlight, its effectiveness in deep learning is yet to be proven. In…

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…

The application of stochastic variance reduction to optimization has shown remarkable recent theoretical and practical success. The applicability of these techniques to the hard non-convex optimization problems encountered during training…

Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is a popular variance reduction technique for accelerating stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide a first analysis of the method for solving a class of linear inverse problems in the lens…

Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…

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…

Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate,…

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…

Stochastic first-order methods for empirical risk minimization employ gradient approximations based on sampled data in lieu of exact gradients. Such constructions introduce noise into the learning dynamics, which can be corrected through…

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…

Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for machine learning with large-scale data. However, their convergence often suffers from non-vanishing variance. Variance Reduction (VR) methods, such as SVRG and SARAH, address this issue…

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…

Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…

Despite the strong theoretical guarantees that variance-reduced finite-sum optimization algorithms enjoy, their applicability remains limited to cases where the memory overhead they introduce (SAG/SAGA), or the periodic full gradient…

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…

Stochastic optimization lies at the heart of machine learning, and its cornerstone is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a method introduced over 60 years ago. The last 8 years have seen an exciting new development: variance reduction (VR)…

Variance reduced stochastic gradient (SGD) methods converge significantly faster than the vanilla SGD counterpart. However, these methods are not very practical on large scale problems, as they either i) require frequent passes over the…

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…