Related papers: Improving Gradient Estimation in Evolutionary Stra…
In this paper, we try to improve exploration in Blackbox methods, particularly Evolution strategies (ES), when applied to Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems where intermediate waypoints/subgoals are available. Since Evolutionary…
Computing the gradient of a function provides fundamental information about its behavior. This information is essential for several applications and algorithms across various fields. One common application that require gradients are…
Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples -- minor perturbations added to a model's input which cause the model to output an incorrect prediction. We introduce a new method for improving the efficacy of adversarial attacks…
Stochastic neurons and hard non-linearities can be useful for a number of reasons in deep learning models, but in many cases they pose a challenging problem: how to estimate the gradient of a loss function with respect to the input of such…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…
The transition of the power grid requires new technologies and methodologies, which can only be developed and tested in simulations. Especially larger simulation setups with many levels of detail can become quite slow. Therefore, the number…
Surrogate models driven by sizeable datasets and scientific machine-learning methods have emerged as an attractive microstructure simulation tool with the potential to deliver predictive microstructure evolution dynamics with huge savings…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is widely used for solving black-box optimization and control problems. In particular, single-point ZO (SZO) is well-suited to online or dynamic problem settings due to its requirement of only a single…
Data-efficient image classification is a challenging task that aims to solve image classification using small training data. Neural network-based deep learning methods are effective for image classification, but they typically require…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…
The recent growth of emergent network applications (e.g., satellite networks, vehicular networks) is increasing the complexity of managing modern communication networks. As a result, the community proposed the Digital Twin Networks (DTN) as…
Evolution Strategies (ES) are effective gradient-free optimization methods that can be competitive with gradient-based approaches for policy search. ES only rely on the total episodic scores of solutions in their population, from which they…
Optimizing functions without access to gradients is the remit of black-box methods such as evolution strategies. While highly general, their learning dynamics are often times heuristic and inflexible - exactly the limitations that…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Gradient boosting is a state-of-the-art prediction technique that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of simple predictors---typically decision trees---by solving an infinite-dimensional convex optimization…
This paper introduces an approach that integrates self-adaptive Evolution Strategies (ES) with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the explainability of complex optimization processes. By employing a self-adaptive ES equipped with a…
Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
Deep learning has proven to be effective in a wide variety of loss minimization problems. However, many applications of interest, like minimizing projected Bellman error and min-max optimization, cannot be modelled as minimizing a scalar…