Related papers: Greedy-GQ with Variance Reduction: Finite-time Ana…
In this project, we propose a Variational Inference algorithm to approximate posterior distributions. Building on prior methods, we develop the Gradient-Steered Stein Variational Gradient Descent (G-SVGD) approach. This method introduces a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…
In this paper, we analyze the greedy randomized Kaczmarz (GRK) method proposed in Bai and Wu (SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 40(1):A592--A606, 2018) for solving linear systems. We develop more precise greedy probability criteria to effectively…
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…
Despite the strong theoretical guarantees that variance-reduced finite-sum optimization algorithms enjoy, their applicability remains limited to cases where the memory overhead they introduce (SAG/SAGA), or the periodic full gradient…
This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…
Test-time data augmentation$-$averaging the predictions of a machine learning model across multiple augmented samples of data$-$is a widely used technique that improves the predictive performance. While many advanced learnable data…
Safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a critical issue given their rapid progresses. Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) is shown to be effective in constructing adversarial prompts to break the aligned LLMs, but optimization of…
We study the problem of scheduling sensors in a resource-constrained linear dynamical system, where the objective is to select a small subset of sensors from a large network to perform the state estimation task. We formulate this problem as…
Motivated by modern applications such as computerized adaptive testing, sequential rank aggregation, and heterogeneous data source selection, we study the problem of active sequential estimation, which involves adaptively selecting…
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)…
We present Re-weighted Gradient Descent (RGD), a novel optimization technique that improves the performance of deep neural networks through dynamic sample re-weighting. Leveraging insights from distributionally robust optimization (DRO)…
Despite the great success of deep learning, recent works show that large deep neural networks are often highly redundant and can be significantly reduced in size. However, the theoretical question of how much we can prune a neural network…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for real-world robotic applications need a data-efficient learning process and the ability to handle complex, unknown dynamical systems. These requirements are handled well by model-based and…
This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…
This paper provides a theoretical study of deep neural function approximation in reinforcement learning (RL) with the $\epsilon$-greedy exploration under the online setting. This problem setting is motivated by the successful deep…
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…
This paper presents a novel value iteration (VI) algorithm for finding the optimal control for a kind of infinite-horizon stochastic linear quadratic (SLQ) problem with unknown systems. First, an off-line algorithm is estabilished to obtain…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…