Related papers: New Versions of Gradient Temporal Difference Learn…
It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems rare and they typically perform well. However, recent work…
How can we understand gradient-based training over non-convex landscapes? The edge of stability phenomenon, introduced in Cohen et al. (2021), indicates that the answer is not so simple: namely, gradient descent (GD) with large step sizes…
Gradient-related first-order methods have become the workhorse of large-scale numerical optimization problems. Many of these problems involve nonconvex objective functions with multiple saddle points, which necessitates an understanding of…
Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…
In large-scale distributed machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic…
Based on SGD, previous works have proposed many algorithms that have improved convergence speed and generalization in stochastic optimization, such as SGDm, AdaGrad, Adam, etc. However, their convergence analysis under non-convex conditions…
Gradient descent is an important class of iterative algorithms for minimizing convex functions. Classically, gradient descent has been a sequential and synchronous process. Distributed and asynchronous variants of gradient descent have been…
In this paper we introduce a unified analysis of a large family of variants of proximal stochastic gradient descent ({\tt SGD}) which so far have required different intuitions, convergence analyses, have different applications, and which…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…
Gradient temporal-difference methods provide stable off-policy prediction with linear function approximation, but their practical performance is strongly affected by the geometry induced by the auxiliary-variable metric. Existing…
In this paper, we present a unified analysis of methods for such a wide class of problems as variational inequalities, which includes minimization problems and saddle point problems. We develop our analysis on the modified Extra-Gradient…
Stochastic distributed optimization methods that solve an optimization problem over a multi-agent network have played an important role in a variety of large-scale signal processing and machine leaning applications. Among the existing…
Differential graphical models are designed to represent the difference between the conditional dependence structures of two groups, thus are of particular interest for scientific investigation. Motivated by modern applications, this…
We study the convergence of $\mathtt{Expected~Sarsa}(\lambda)$ with linear function approximation. We show that applying the off-line estimate (multi-step bootstrapping) to $\mathtt{Expected~Sarsa}(\lambda)$ is unstable for off-policy…
We propose an adaptively weighted stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics algorithm (SGLD), so-called contour stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (CSGLD), for Bayesian learning in big data statistics. The proposed algorithm is essentially a…
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 provide an overview of first-order and second-order variants of the gradient descent method that are commonly used in machine learning. We propose a general framework in which 6 of these variants can be interpreted as…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
We formulate two classes of first-order algorithms more general than previously studied for minimizing smooth and strongly convex or, respectively, smooth and convex functions. We establish sufficient conditions, via new discrete Lyapunov…
We explore fixed-horizon temporal difference (TD) methods, reinforcement learning algorithms for a new kind of value function that predicts the sum of rewards over a $\textit{fixed}$ number of future time steps. To learn the value function…