English
Related papers

Related papers: Finite-sample Analysis of Greedy-GQ with Linear Fu…

200 papers

We consider the maximization of a submodular objective function $f:2^U\to\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$, where the objective $f$ is not accessed as a value oracle but instead subject to noisy queries. We introduce a versatile adaptive sampling…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Wenjing Chen , Shuo Xing , Victoria G. Crawford

This paper provides a theoretical understanding of Deep Q-Network (DQN) with the $\varepsilon$-greedy exploration in deep reinforcement learning. Despite the tremendous empirical achievement of the DQN, its theoretical characterization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Shuai Zhang , Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Miao Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Songtao Lu , Sijia Liu , Keerthiram Murugesan , Subhajit Chaudhury

MAXCUT defines a classical NP-hard problem for graph partitioning and it serves as a typical case of the symmetric non-monotone Unconstrained Submodular Maximization (USM) problem. Applications of MAXCUT are abundant in machine learning,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-09-06 Yatao Bian , Alexey Gronskiy , Joachim M. Buhmann

Motivated by recent work on stochastic gradient descent methods, we develop two stochastic variants of greedy algorithms for possibly non-convex optimization problems with sparsity constraints. We prove linear convergence in expectation to…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2014-07-02 Nam Nguyen , Deanna Needell , Tina Woolf

We analyze greedy algorithms for the Hierarchical Aggregation (HAG) problem, a strategy introduced in [Jia et al., KDD 2020] for speeding up learning on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The idea of HAG is to identify and remove redundancies in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Alexandra Porter , Mary Wootters

Full-sampling (e.g., Q-learning) and pure-expectation (e.g., Expected Sarsa) algorithms are efficient and frequently used techniques in reinforcement learning. Q$(\sigma,\lambda)$ is the first approach unifies them with eligibility trace…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Long Yang , Yu Zhang , Qian Zheng , Pengfei Li , Gang Pan

Q-learning is a stochastic approximation version of the classic value iteration. The literature has established that Q-learning suffers from both maximization bias and slower convergence. Recently, multi-step algorithms have shown practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Antony Vijesh , Shreyas S R

We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Ali Devran Kara

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Q-learning, perform poorly in the early stages of learning in noisy environments, because much effort is spent unlearning biased estimates of the state-action value function. The bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-01 Roy Fox , Ari Pakman , Naftali Tishby

Two-time-scale Stochastic Approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm with applications in reinforcement learning and optimization. Prior finite time analysis of such algorithms has focused on fixed point iterations with mappings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Siddharth Chandak , Shaan Ul Haque , Nicholas Bambos

We study the problem of scheduling sensors in a resource-constrained linear dynamical system, where the objective is to select a small subset of sensors from a large network to perform the state estimation task. We formulate this problem as…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Abolfazl Hashemi , Mahsa Ghasemi , Haris Vikalo , Ufuk Topcu

Two-timescale Stochastic Approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their iterates have two parts that are updated using distinct stepsizes. In this work, we develop a novel recipe for their finite sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-06 Gal Dalal , Balazs Szorenyi , Gugan Thoppe , Shie Mannor

Linear reversible circuits represent a subclass of reversible circuits with many applications in quantum computing. These circuits can be efficiently simulated by classical computers and their size is polynomially bounded by the number of…

Existing studies indicate that momentum ideas in conventional optimization can be used to improve the performance of Q-learning algorithms. However, the finite-sample analysis for momentum-based Q-learning algorithms is only available for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Bowen Weng , Huaqing Xiong , Lin Zhao , Yingbin Liang , Wei Zhang

In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-01-04 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

The paper introduces the first formulation of convex Q-learning for Markov decision processes with function approximation. The algorithms and theory rest on a relaxation of a dual of Manne's celebrated linear programming characterization of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-12 Fan Lu , Sean Meyn

Stochastic approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of an operator using noisy samples and widely used in optimization and Reinforcement Learning (RL). The noise in RL exhibits a Markovian structure, and in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shaan Ul Haque , Sajad Khodadadian , Siva Theja Maguluri

In this work, we present the first finite-time analysis of Q-learning with time-varying learning policies (i.e., on-policy sampling) for discounted Markov decision processes under minimal assumptions, requiring only the existence of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Phalguni Nanda , Zaiwei Chen

High-dimensional linear regression under heavy-tailed noise or outlier corruption is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-11 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia

This paper proposes a new algorithm for multiple sparse regression in high dimensions, where the task is to estimate the support and values of several (typically related) sparse vectors from a few noisy linear measurements. Our algorithm is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-06-08 Ali Jalali , Sujay Sanghavi