Related papers: Momentum Q-learning with Finite-Sample Convergence…

Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…

Q-learning suffers from overestimation bias, because it approximates the maximum action value using the maximum estimated action value. Algorithms have been proposed to reduce overestimation bias, but we lack an understanding of how bias…

The development of machine learning algorithms has been gathering relevance to address the increasing modelling complexity of manufacturing decision-making problems. Reinforcement learning is a methodology with great potential due to the…

Quantum Boltzmann machines (QBMs) are machine-learning models for both classical and quantum data. We give an operational definition of QBM learning in terms of the difference in expectation values between the model and target, taking into…

$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. It is widely believed that $Q$-learning with linear function approximation (i.e., linear $Q$-learning) suffers from possible divergence until the recent work…

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…

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal policies for satisfying signal temporal logic (STL) specifications by agents with unknown stochastic dynamics. The system is modeled as a Markov decision process, in which the states…

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…

Large-scale multi-agent systems are often deployed across wide geographic areas, where agents interact with heterogeneous environments. There is an emerging interest in understanding the role of heterogeneity in the performance of the…

Quantum machine learning promises great speedups over classical algorithms, but it often requires repeated computations to achieve a desired level of accuracy for its point estimates. Bayesian learning focuses more on sampling from…

Existing convergence analyses of Q-learning mostly focus on the vanilla stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type of updates. Despite the Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) has been commonly used for practical Q-learning algorithms, there has…

We present an approach called Q-probing to adapt a pre-trained language model to maximize a task-specific reward function. At a high level, Q-probing sits between heavier approaches such as finetuning and lighter approaches such as few shot…

The Zap Q-learning algorithm introduced in this paper is an improvement of Watkins' original algorithm and recent competitors in several respects. It is a matrix-gain algorithm designed so that its asymptotic variance is optimal. Moreover,…

The current paper studies the problem of agnostic $Q$-learning with function approximation in deterministic systems where the optimal $Q$-function is approximable by a function in the class $\mathcal{F}$ with approximation error $\delta \ge…

The training of modern machine learning models often consists in solving high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems that are subject to large-scale data. In this context, momentum-based stochastic optimisation algorithms have become…

Continual learning requires to overcome catastrophic forgetting when training a single model on a sequence of tasks. Recent top-performing approaches are prompt-based methods that utilize a set of learnable parameters (i.e., prompts) to…

Quasar convexity is a condition that allows some first-order methods to efficiently minimize a function even when the optimization landscape is non-convex. Previous works develop near-optimal accelerated algorithms for minimizing this class…

Momentum method has been used extensively in optimizers for deep learning. Recent studies show that distributed training through K-step averaging has many nice properties. We propose a momentum method for such model averaging approaches. At…

Reinforcement learning has witnessed significant advancements, particularly with the emergence of model-based approaches. Among these, $Q$-learning has proven to be a powerful algorithm in model-free settings. However, the extension of…

This paper develops a novel control-theoretic framework to analyze the non-asymptotic convergence of Q-learning. We show that the dynamics of asynchronous Q-learning with a constant step-size can be naturally formulated as a discrete-time…