Related papers: Proximal Gradient Temporal Difference Learning: St…
Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…
Gradient clipping is a fundamental tool in Deep Learning, improving the high-probability convergence of stochastic first-order methods like SGD, AdaGrad, and Adam under heavy-tailed noise, which is common in training large language models.…
Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…
Many applications in machine learning or signal processing involve nonsmooth optimization problems. This nonsmoothness brings a low-dimensional structure to the optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a randomized proximal gradient…
Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…
Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…
The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…
We study two time-scale linear stochastic approximation algorithms, which can be used to model well-known reinforcement learning algorithms such as GTD, GTD2, and TDC. We present finite-time performance bounds for the case where the…
We study a posterior sampling approach to efficient exploration in constrained reinforcement learning. Alternatively to existing algorithms, we propose two simple algorithms that are more efficient statistically, simpler to implement and…
Deep neural networks have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance in several machine learning tasks. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the preferred optimization algorithm for training these networks and asynchronous SGD…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…
In this paper we introduce the idea of improving the performance of parametric temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithms by selectively emphasizing or de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. In particular, we show that…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and…
In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…
Policy evaluation in reinforcement learning is often conducted using two-timescale stochastic approximation, which results in various gradient temporal difference methods such as GTD(0), GTD2, and TDC. Here, we provide convergence rate…
Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) is a strong and widely used first-order adversarial attack, yet its computational cost scales poorly, as all training samples undergo identical iterative inner-loop optimization despite contributing…
A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…
In this paper, we adapt proximal incremental aggregated gradient methods to saddle point problems, which is motivated by decoupling linear transformations in regularized empirical risk minimization models. First, the Primal-Dual Proximal…