Related papers: Convergence and Optimality of Policy Gradient Meth…
While the optimization landscape of policy gradient methods has been recently investigated for partially observed linear systems in terms of both static output feedback and dynamical controllers, they only provide convergence guarantees to…
Policy gradient methods have enabled deep reinforcement learning (RL) to approach challenging continuous control problems, even when the underlying systems involve highly nonlinear dynamics that generate complex non-smooth optimization…
In this paper, we study the global convergence of model-based and model-free policy gradient descent and natural policy gradient descent algorithms for linear quadratic deep structured teams. In such systems, agents are partitioned into a…
In this paper, we propose a new way to obtain optimal convergence rates for smooth stochastic (strong) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for optimization tasks where gradients have nonrandom noise. In contrast to…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…
We develop a neural-network framework for multi-period risk--reward stochastic control problems with constrained two-step feedback policies that may be discontinuous in the state. We allow a broad class of objectives built on a…
The objectives of this technical report is to provide additional results on the generalized conditional gradient methods introduced by Bredies et al. [BLM05]. Indeed , when the objective function is smooth, we provide a novel certificate of…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…
This work establishes new convergence guarantees for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating…
We establish new theoretical convergence guarantees for the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA), where the second function is allowed to be weakly-convex, measuring progress via composite gradient mapping. Based on a tight analysis of two…
The classical convergence analysis of SGD is carried out under the assumption that the norm of the stochastic gradient is uniformly bounded. While this might hold for some loss functions, it is violated for cases where the objective…
Features in machine learning problems are often time-varying and may be related to outputs in an algebraic or dynamical manner. The dynamic nature of these machine learning problems renders current higher order accelerated gradient descent…
We consider gradient descent with constant stepsizes and derive exact worst-case convergence rates on the minimum gradient norm of the iterates. Our analysis covers all possible stepsizes and arbitrary upper/lower bounds on the curvature of…
This paper investigates gradient-based adaptive prediction and control for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems under a weak convexity condition on the prediction-based loss. This condition accommodates a broad range of nonlinear models…
We discuss conditions ensuring the (strict) convergence of stochastic gradient algorithms.
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…
$L_0$-smoothness, which has been pivotal to advancing decentralized optimization theory, is often fairly restrictive for modern tasks like deep learning. The recent advent of relaxed $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness condition enables improved…