Related papers: Sample Complexity Bounds for Two Timescale Value-b…

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a popular variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent, where properly scaled isotropic Gaussian noise is added to an unbiased estimate of the gradient at each iteration. This modest change allows…

In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive-rank method for simulating multi-scale BGK equations, based on a greedy sampling strategy. The method adaptively selects important rows and columns of the solution matrix and updates them using a…

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for a class of multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal-difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement…

Two-time-scale stochastic approximation algorithms are iterative methods used in applications such as optimization, reinforcement learning, and control. Finite-time analysis of these algorithms has primarily focused on fixed point…

Models based on recursive adaptive partitioning such as decision trees and their ensembles are popular for high-dimensional regression as they can potentially avoid the curse of dimensionality. Because empirical risk minimization (ERM) is…

Motivated by broad applications in reinforcement learning and machine learning, this paper considers the popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when the gradients of the underlying objective function are sampled from Markov processes.…

Submodular maximization under matroid constraints is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization with applications in sensing, data summarization, active learning, and resource allocation. While the Sequential Greedy (SG) algorithm…

Temporal-difference learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study the convergence of the regularized non-parametric TD(0) algorithm, in both the independent and Markovian observation settings. In particular,…

Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

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…

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…

Reinforcement learning is widely used in applications where one needs to perform sequential decisions while interacting with the environment. The problem becomes more challenging when the decision requirement includes satisfying some safety…

In this paper, we establish non-asymptotic bounds for accuracy of normal approximation for linear two-timescale stochastic approximation (TTSA) algorithms driven by martingale difference or Markov noise. Focusing on both the last iterate…

In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…

In machine learning, asynchronous parallel stochastic gradient descent (APSGD) is broadly used to speed up the training process through multi-workers. Meanwhile, the time delay of stale gradients in asynchronous algorithms is generally…

We study the training dynamics of shallow neural networks, in a two-timescale regime in which the stepsizes for the inner layer are much smaller than those for the outer layer. In this regime, we prove convergence of the gradient flow to a…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…

We consider emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithms for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes with finite spaces. Such algorithms were recently proposed by Sutton, Mahmood, and White (2015) as an improved…

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic and asymptotic performances of the optimal robust policy and value function of robust Markov Decision Processes(MDPs), where the optimal robust policy and value function are solved only from a…