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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…
We propose two policy gradient algorithms for solving the problem of control in an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) context. Both algorithms incorporate a smoothed functional (SF) based gradient estimation scheme. The first algorithm…
Optimizing risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of a general loss distribution is usually difficult, because 1) the loss function might lack structural properties such as convexity or…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition…
Off-policy learning is key to scaling up reinforcement learning as it allows to learn about a target policy from the experience generated by a different behavior policy. Unfortunately, it has been challenging to combine off-policy learning…
In statistics and machine learning, approximation of an intractable integration is often achieved by using the unbiased Monte Carlo estimator, but the variances of the estimation are generally high in many applications. Control variates…
Off-policy learning and evaluation leverage logged bandit feedback datasets, which contain context, action, propensity score, and feedback for each data point. These scenarios face significant challenges due to high variance and poor…
Solving the Goal-Conditioned Reward Sparse (GCRS) task is a challenging reinforcement learning problem due to the sparsity of reward signals. In this work, we propose a new formulation of GCRS tasks from the perspective of the drifted…
Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…
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…
In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…
Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…
Off-policy reinforcement learning with eligibility traces is challenging because of the discrepancy between target policy and behavior policy. One common approach is to measure the difference between two policies in a probabilistic way,…
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…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…
This paper presents novel methods for achieving stable and efficient convergence in multivariable extremum seeking control (ESC) using sliding mode techniques. Drawing inspiration from both classical sliding mode control and more recent…
Many off-policy prediction learning algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, but it remains unclear which algorithms learn faster than others. We empirically compare 11 off-policy prediction learning algorithms with linear function…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for variance reduced stochastic gradient descent methods such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new…
We pursue a life-long learning approach to artificial intelligence that makes extensive use of reinforcement learning algorithms. We build on our prior work with general value functions (GVFs) and the Horde architecture. GVFs have been…
Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…