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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms still suffer from high sample complexity despite outstanding recent successes. The need for intensive interactions with the environment is especially observed in many widely popular policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Samuele Tosatto , Joao Carvalho , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

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

We address the challenging problem of deep representation learning--the efficient adaption of a pre-trained deep network to different tasks. Specifically, we propose to explore gradient-based features. These features are gradients of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Fangzhou Mu , Yingyu Liang , Yin Li

Supervised training of neural networks for classification is typically performed with a global loss function. The loss function provides a gradient for the output layer, and this gradient is back-propagated to hidden layers to dictate an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-09 Arild Nøkland , Lars Hiller Eidnes

In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Causal machine-learning is about predicting the net-effect (true-lift) of treatments. Given the data of a treatment group and a control group, it is similar to a standard supervised-learning problem. Unfortunately, there is no similarly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-06 I-Sheng Yang

We study whether a risk-sensitive objective from asset-pricing theory -- recursive utility -- improves reinforcement learning for portfolio allocation. The Bellman equation under recursive utility involves a certainty equivalent (CE) of…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-25 Minkey Chang

We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Philip Amortila , Doina Precup , Prakash Panangaden , Marc G. Bellemare

Many real-world optimization problems contain parameters that are unknown before deployment time, either due to stochasticity or to lack of information (e.g., demand or travel times in delivery problems). A common strategy in such cases is…

We consider the problem of sequential decision making under uncertainty in which the loss caused by a decision depends on the following binary observation. In competitive on-line learning, the goal is to design decision algorithms that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Vladimir Vovk

In this paper, we study two general classes of optimization algorithms for kernel methods with convex loss function and quadratic norm regularization, and analyze their convergence. The first approach, based on fixed-point iterations, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-07-02 Francesco Dinuzzo

The use of pessimism, when reasoning about datasets lacking exhaustive exploration has recently gained prominence in offline reinforcement learning. Despite the robustness it adds to the algorithm, overly pessimistic reasoning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Tengyang Xie , Ching-An Cheng , Nan Jiang , Paul Mineiro , Alekh Agarwal

We consider the regret minimization problem in reinforcement learning (RL) in the episodic setting. In many real-world RL environments, the state and action spaces are continuous or very large. Existing approaches establish regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Rafael Oliveira

We propose a novel parameter estimation procedure that works efficiently for conditional random fields (CRF). This algorithm is an extension to the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), using loss functions defined by Bregman divergences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-11 Yuan Cao

How to train deep neural networks (DNNs) to generalize well is a central concern in deep learning, especially for severely overparameterized networks nowadays. In this paper, we propose an effective method to improve the model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Yang Zhao , Hao Zhang , Xiuyuan Hu

Reinforcement learning algorithms can solve dynamic decision-making and optimal control problems. With continuous-valued state and input variables, reinforcement learning algorithms must rely on function approximators to represent the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Jiří Kubalík , Erik Derner , Jan Žegklitz , Robert Babuška

We introduce a novel loss function, Covariance Loss, which is conceptually equivalent to conditional neural processes and has a form of regularization so that is applicable to many kinds of neural networks. With the proposed loss, mappings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Boseon Yoo , Jiwoo Lee , Janghoon Ju , Seijun Chung , Soyeon Kim , Jaesik Choi

Multi-output is essential in machine learning that it might suffer from nonconforming residual distributions, i.e., the multi-output residual distributions are not conforming to the expected distribution. In this paper, we propose "Wrapped…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Chun Ting Liu , Ming Chuan Yang , Meng Chang Chen

Training deep neural networks is a highly nontrivial task, involving carefully selecting appropriate training algorithms, scheduling step sizes and tuning other hyperparameters. Trying different combinations can be quite labor-intensive and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-13 Kaifeng Lv , Shunhua Jiang , Jian Li