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Policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in challenging learning tasks such as continuous control, but suffer from high sample complexity. Experience replay is a commonly used approach to…
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)…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables policy optimization from static datasets but is inherently vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing attack strategies typically struggle against safety-constrained algorithms (e.g., CQL) due to…
In this paper, we provide a generalized framework for Variational Inference-Stochastic Optimal Control by using thenon-extensive Tsallis divergence. By incorporating the deformed exponential function into the optimality likelihood function,…
This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…
This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in…
Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…
Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
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…
A Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is a framework used for modeling and solving constrained problems. Tree-search algorithms like backtracking try to construct a solution to a CSP by selecting the variables of the problem one after…
This article develops a new algorithm named TTRISK to solve high-dimensional risk-averse optimization problems governed by differential equations (ODEs and/or PDEs) under uncertainty. As an example, we focus on the so-called Conditional…
Nonlinear equations systems (NESs) are widely used in real-world problems while they are also difficult to solve due to their characteristics of nonlinearity and multiple roots. Evolutionary algorithm (EA) is one of the methods for solving…
This paper studies bandit convex optimization with constraints, where the learner aims to generate a sequence of decisions under partial information of loss functions such that the cumulative loss is reduced as well as the cumulative…
This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…
Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has proven effective in solving many inventory control problems with demand learning. However, it often faces the pitfall of an infeasible target inventory level that is lower than the current inventory…
We develop two variance-reduced fast operator splitting methods to approximate solutions of a class of generalized equations, covering fundamental problems such as \rvs{minimization}, minimax problems, and variational inequalities as…
Policy gradient methods are appealing in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimate. To reduce the variance, the state value function is applied commonly. However, the effect of the state value function…
Reinforcement learning (RL) using foundation models for policy approximations in multi-turn tasks remains challenging. We identify two main limitations related to sparse reward settings and policy gradient updates, based on which we…