Related papers: SVRG for Policy Evaluation with Fewer Gradient Eva…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…

We combine two advanced ideas widely used in optimization for machine learning: shuffling strategy and momentum technique to develop a novel shuffling gradient-based method with momentum, coined Shuffling Momentum Gradient (SMG), for…

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

This paper describes a novel algorithmic framework to minimize a finite-sum of functions available over a network of nodes. The proposed framework, that we call~\GTVR, is stochastic and decentralized, and thus is particularly suitable for…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…

We study a risk-constrained version of the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem, where the risk measure considered is Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We propose two algorithms that obtain a locally risk-optimal policy by employing four…

Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a powerful optimization solver in machine learning. Recently, stochastic ADMM has been integrated with variance reduction methods for stochastic gradient, leading to SAG-ADMM and…

In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…

We develop an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve the affine rank minimization problem consists of finding a matrix of minimum rank from linear measurements. The proposed algorithm as a stochastic…

We propose a remarkably general variance-reduced method suitable for solving regularized empirical risk minimization problems with either a large number of training examples, or a large model dimension, or both. In special cases, our method…

We propose a method for designing policies for convex stochastic control problems characterized by random linear dynamics and convex stage cost. We consider policies that employ quadratic approximate value functions as a substitute for the…

Variance reduction is a crucial tool for improving the slow convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Only a few variance-reduced methods, however, have yet been shown to directly benefit from Nesterov's acceleration techniques to match…

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

Two-time-scale optimization is a framework introduced in Zeng et al. (2024) that abstracts a range of policy evaluation and policy optimization problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Akin to bi-level optimization under a particular type…

In this paper, we consider to improve the stochastic variance reduce gradient (SVRG) method via incorporating the curvature information of the objective function. We propose to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients using the…

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)…

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Recent years have witnessed exciting progress in the study of stochastic variance reduced gradient methods (e.g., SVRG, SAGA), their accelerated variants (e.g, Katyusha) and their extensions in many different settings (e.g., online, sparse,…