Related papers: Stochastic Recursive Momentum for Policy Gradient …
Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…
In this contribution, we present a numerical analysis of the continuous stochastic gradient (CSG) method, including applications from topology optimization and convergence rates. In contrast to standard stochastic gradient optimization…
In this paper, for solving a broad class of large-scale nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems, we propose a stochastic two step inertial Bregman proximal alternating linearized minimization (STiBPALM) algorithm with variance-reduced…
Many machine learning, statistical inference, and portfolio optimization problems require minimization of a composition of expected value functions (CEVF). Of particular interest is the finite-sum versions of such compositional optimization…
We develop a novel optimistic gradient-type algorithmic framework, combining both Nesterov's acceleration and variance-reduction techniques, to solve a class of generalized equations involving possibly nonmonotone operators in data-driven…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…
Stochastic gradient methods with momentum are widely used in applications and at the core of optimization subroutines in many popular machine learning libraries. However, their sample complexities have not been obtained for problems beyond…
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…
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…
Stochastic optimization naturally appear in many application areas, including machine learning. Our goal is to go further in the analysis of the Stochastic Average Gradient Accelerated (SAGA) algorithm. To achieve this, we introduce a new…
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has become the standard algorithm for training machine learning models with rigorous privacy guarantees. Despite its widespread use, the theoretical understanding of its long-run…
Stochastic coordinate descent algorithms are efficient methods in which each iterate is obtained by fixing most coordinates at their values from the current iteration, and approximately minimizing the objective with respect to the remaining…
Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…
Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on exploration to discover new behaviors, which is typically achieved by following a stochastic policy. In continuous control tasks, policies with a Gaussian distribution have been widely adopted.…
This paper is concerned with convergence of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum terms in the nonconvex setting. A class of stochastic momentum methods, including stochastic gradient descent, heavy ball, and Nesterov's accelerated…
We establish a convergence theorem for a certain type of stochastic gradient descent, which leads to a convergent variant of the back-propagation algorithm
We develop the method of stochastic modified equations (SME), in which stochastic gradient algorithms are approximated in the weak sense by continuous-time stochastic differential equations. We exploit the continuous formulation together…
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 consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…