Related papers: Borrowing From the Future: An Attempt to Address D…

In model-free reinforcement learning, the temporal difference method and its variants become unstable when combined with nonlinear function approximations. Bellman residual minimization with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is more stable,…

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

Bilevel Optimization has experienced significant advancements recently with the introduction of new efficient algorithms. Mirroring the success in single-level optimization, stochastic gradient-based algorithms are widely used in bilevel…

Modern retrieval problems are characterised by training sets with potentially billions of labels, and heterogeneous data distributions across subpopulations (e.g., users of a retrieval system may be from different countries), each of which…

State abstraction has been an essential tool for dramatically improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement-learning algorithms. Indeed, by exposing and accentuating various types of latent structure within the environment, different…

Existing data-free model stealing methods use a generator to produce samples in order to train a student model to match the target model outputs. To this end, the two main challenges are estimating gradients of the target model without…

Many machine learning tasks, such as learning with invariance and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, can be characterized as problems of learning from conditional distributions. In such problems, each sample $x$ itself is…

We consider the problem of online reinforcement learning for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem modeled as an unknown MDP with an absorbing state. We propose PSRL-SSP, a simple posterior sampling-based reinforcement learning…

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…

Backpropagation with gradient descent is a common optimization strategy employed by most neural network architectures in machine learning. However, finding optimal hyperparameters to guide training has proven challenging. While it is widely…

This paper considers a class of reinforcement learning problems, which involve systems with two types of states: stochastic and pseudo-stochastic. In such systems, stochastic states follow a stochastic transition kernel while the…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…

Most existing neural network-based approaches for solving stochastic optimal control problems using the associated backward dynamic programming principle rely on the ability to simulate the underlying state variables. However, in some…

In the near future, robots are expected to work with humans or operate alone and may replace human workers in various fields such as homes and factories. In a previous study, we proposed bilateral control-based imitation learning that…

Despite its experimental success, Model-based Reinforcement Learning still lacks a complete theoretical understanding. To this end, we analyze the error in the cumulative reward using a contraction approach. We consider both stochastic and…

We describe a new approach for managing aleatoric uncertainty in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm. Instead of selecting actions according to a single statistic, we propose a distributional method based on the second-order stochastic…

The distribution regression problem encompasses many important statistics and machine learning tasks, and arises in a large range of applications. Among various existing approaches to tackle this problem, kernel methods have become a method…

Scheduled sampling is a technique for avoiding one of the known problems in sequence-to-sequence generation: exposure bias. It consists of feeding the model a mix of the teacher forced embeddings and the model predictions from the previous…

Autonomous machine learning systems that learn many tasks in sequence are prone to the catastrophic forgetting problem. Mathematical theory is needed in order to understand the extent of forgetting during continual learning. As a…

It has been found that stochastic algorithms often find good solutions much more rapidly than inherently-batch approaches. Indeed, a very useful rule of thumb is that often, when solving a machine learning problem, an iterative technique…