Related papers: Variance Reduction for Deep Q-Learning using Stoch…
We propose an inexact variable-metric proximal point algorithm to accelerate gradient-based optimization algorithms. The proposed scheme, called QNing can be notably applied to incremental first-order methods such as the stochastic…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
In this paper, we proposed a new technique, {\em variance controlled stochastic gradient} (VCSG), to improve the performance of the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm. To avoid over-reducing the variance of gradient by…
Adaptive gradient methods, which adopt historical gradient information to automatically adjust the learning rate, despite the nice property of fast convergence, have been observed to generalize worse than stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…
We introduce a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm called Deep Quality-Value (DQV) Learning. DQV uses temporal-difference learning to train a Value neural network and uses this network for training a second Quality-value…
This paper presents a novel neural network training approach for faster convergence and better generalization abilities in deep reinforcement learning. Particularly, we focus on the enhancement of training and evaluation performance in…
Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of…
We consider a class of non-smooth strongly convex-strongly concave saddle point problems in a decentralized setting without a central server. To solve a consensus formulation of problems in this class, we develop an inexact primal dual…
While contemporary reinforcement learning research and applications have embraced policy gradient methods as the panacea of solving learning problems, value-based methods can still be useful in many domains as long as we can wrangle with…
Power distribution networks are approaching their voltage stability boundaries due to the severe voltage violations and the inadequate reactive power reserves caused by the increasing renewable generations and dynamic loads. In the broad…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision; however, training DNNs for satisfactory performance remains challenging and suffers from sensitivity to empirical selections of an optimization algorithm for…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods such as the Deep Q-Network (DQN) have achieved state-of-the-art results in a variety of challenging, high-dimensional domains. This success is mainly attributed to the power of deep neural networks…
Despite the omnipresent use of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization methods in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), it remains, in basically all practically relevant scenarios, a fundamental open problem to provide a…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been proposed as biologically plausible and energy-efficient alternatives to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, the training of SNN usually relies on surrogate gradients due to the…
Variance reduction (VR) methods boost the performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by enabling the use of larger, constant stepsizes and preserving linear convergence rates. However, current variance reduced SGD methods require…
We present a novel algorithm to train a deep Q-learning agent using natural-gradient techniques. We compare the original deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm to its natural-gradient counterpart, which we refer to as NGDQN, on a collection of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control often requires large amounts of online interaction data. Value-based RL methods can mitigate this burden by offering relatively high sample efficiency. Some studies further enhance sample…
Stochastic gradient algorithms estimate the gradient based on only one or a few samples and enjoy low computational cost per iteration. They have been widely used in large-scale optimization problems. However, stochastic gradient algorithms…