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Related papers: Stochastic Variance Reduction for Deep Q-learning

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We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Dongruo Zhou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-06 Sashank J. Reddi , Ahmed Hefny , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Alex Smola

Decentralized stochastic optimization has recently benefited from gradient tracking methods \cite{DSGT_Pu,DSGT_Xin} providing efficient solutions for large-scale empirical risk minimization problems. In Part I \cite{GT_SAGA} of this work,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-12 Ran Xin , Usman A. Khan , Soummya Kar

When training a machine learning model with observational data, it is often encountered that some values are systemically missing. Learning from the incomplete data in which the missingness depends on some covariates may lead to biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-24 Kanghoon Lee , Jihye Choi , Moonsu Cha , Jung-Kwon Lee , Taeyoon Kim

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-22 Tao Yi , Xingxuan Wang

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-29 Thomas Hofmann , Aurelien Lucchi , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Brian McWilliams

Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is an accelerated version of stochastic gradient descent based on variance reduction, and is promising for solving large-scale inverse problems. In this work, we analyze SVRG and a regularized…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-18 Bangti Jin , Zehui Zhou

Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) and its variants aim to speed-up training by using gradient corrections, but have seen limited success in deep learning. Here, we show surprising new foundational connections of SVRG to a recently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Nico Daheim , Thomas Möllenhoff , Ming Liang Ang , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

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 study decentralized empirical risk minimization problems, where the goal is to minimize a finite-sum of smooth and strongly-convex functions available over a network of nodes. In this Part I, we propose…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-12 Ran Xin , Usman A. Khan , Soummya Kar

Modern machine learning is trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD), whose performance critically depends on how the learning rate (LR) is adjusted and decreased over time. Yet existing LR regimes may be intricate, or need to tune one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Zhuang Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-10 Soham De , Gavin Taylor , Tom Goldstein

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their action selections so as to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms require solving a nonconvex and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-18 Jacob Rafati , Roummel F. Marcia

We present the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning. The model is a convolutional neural network, trained with a variant of Q-learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-12-20 Volodymyr Mnih , Koray Kavukcuoglu , David Silver , Alex Graves , Ioannis Antonoglou , Daan Wierstra , Martin Riedmiller

Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Caglar Gulcehre , Jose Sotelo , Marcin Moczulski , Yoshua Bengio

Learning an effective representation for high-dimensional data is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) such as Deep Q networks (DQN) achieves remarkable success in computer games by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Borislav Mavrin , Hengshuai Yao , Linglong Kong

We study the stochastic Riemannian gradient algorithm for matrix eigen-decomposition. The state-of-the-art stochastic Riemannian algorithm requires the learning rate to decay to zero and thus suffers from slow convergence and sub-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Zhiqiang Xu , Yiping Ke

In distributional reinforcement learning (RL), the estimated distribution of value function models both the parametric and intrinsic uncertainties. We propose a novel and efficient exploration method for deep RL that has two components. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Borislav Mavrin , Shangtong Zhang , Hengshuai Yao , Linglong Kong , Kaiwen Wu , Yaoliang Yu

Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-18 Ohad Shamir