Related papers: On Convergence of Gradient Expected Sarsa($\lambda…
Off-policy learning is powerful for reinforcement learning. However, the high variance of off-policy evaluation is a critical challenge, which causes off-policy learning falls into an uncontrolled instability. In this paper, for reducing…
In this paper, we analyze the convergence rate of the gradient temporal difference learning (GTD) family of algorithms. Previous analyses of this class of algorithms use ODE techniques to prove asymptotic convergence, and to the best of our…
Off-policy learning is key to scaling up reinforcement learning as it allows to learn about a target policy from the experience generated by a different behavior policy. Unfortunately, it has been challenging to combine off-policy learning…
Full-sampling (e.g., Q-learning) and pure-expectation (e.g., Expected Sarsa) algorithms are efficient and frequently used techniques in reinforcement learning. Q$(\sigma,\lambda)$ is the first approach unifies them with eligibility trace…
Gradient compression is of growing interests for solving constrained optimization problems including compressed sensing, noisy recovery and matrix completion under limited communication resources and storage costs. Convergence analysis of…
We consider the traffic control problem of dynamic routing over parallel servers, which arises in a variety of engineering systems such as transportation and data transmission. We propose a semi-gradient, on-policy algorithm that learns an…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…
Stochastic optimization naturally appear in many application areas, including machine learning. Our goal is to go further in the analysis of the Stochastic Average Gradient Accelerated (SAGA) algorithm. To achieve this, we introduce a new…
This paper considers the problem of designing accelerated gradient-based algorithms for optimization and saddle-point problems. The class of objective functions is defined by a generalized sector condition. This class of functions contains…
We study the iteration complexity of the optimistic gradient descent-ascent (OGDA) method and the extra-gradient (EG) method for finding a saddle point of a convex-concave unconstrained min-max problem. To do so, we first show that both…
Nonconvex optimization underlies many modern machine learning and control tasks, where saddle points pose the dominant obstacle to reliable convergence in high-dimensional settings. Escaping these saddle points deterministically using…
In this work, we propose new adaptive step size strategies that improve several stochastic gradient methods. Our first method (StoPS) is based on the classical Polyak step size (Polyak, 1987) and is an extension of the recent development of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition…
We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
Subspace learning and matrix factorization problems have great many applications in science and engineering, and efficient algorithms are critical as dataset sizes continue to grow. Many relevant problem formulations are non-convex, and in…
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'…
Gradient-based first-order convex optimization algorithms find widespread applicability in a variety of domains, including machine learning tasks. Motivated by the recent advances in fixed-time stability theory of continuous-time dynamical…
Many popular adaptive gradient methods such as Adam and RMSProp rely on an exponential moving average (EMA) to normalize their stepsizes. While the EMA makes these methods highly responsive to new gradient information, recent research has…
In reinforcement learning (RL) , one of the key components is policy evaluation, which aims to estimate the value function (i.e., expected long-term accumulated reward) of a policy. With a good policy evaluation method, the RL algorithms…