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The alternating gradient descent (AGD) is a simple but popular algorithm which has been applied to problems in optimization, machine learning, data ming, and signal processing, etc. The algorithm updates two blocks of variables in an…
We study iterative methods for (two-stage) robust combinatorial optimization problems with discrete uncertainty. We propose a machine-learning-based heuristic to determine starting scenarios that provide strong lower bounds. To this end, we…
This paper investigates preconditioned conjugate gradient techniques for solving kernel ridge regression (KRR) problems with a medium to large number of data points ($10^4 \leq N \leq 10^7$), and it describes two methods with the strongest…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning by rewarding verifiable final answers. Yet answer-correct trajectories may still rely on incomplete derivations, weak evidence, or statements that…
In this paper, we investigate a divide and conquer approach to Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR). Given n samples, the division step involves separating the points based on some underlying disjoint partition of the input space (possibly via…
Playing repeated matrix games (RMG) while maximizing the cumulative returns is a basic method to evaluate multi-agent learning (MAL) algorithms. Previous work has shown that $UCB$, $M3$, $S$ or $Exp3$ algorithms have good behaviours on…
Adaptive methods such as Adam and RMSProp are widely used in deep learning but are not well understood. In this paper, we seek a crisp, clean and precise characterization of their behavior in nonconvex settings. To this end, we first…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…
In this manuscript, we present a collective multigrid algorithm to solve efficiently the large saddle-point systems of equations that typically arise in PDE-constrained optimization under uncertainty, and develop a novel convergence…
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…
We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…
Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…
Low-rank regularization (LRR) has been widely applied in various machine learning tasks, but the associated optimization is challenging. Directly optimizing the rank function under constraints is NP-hard in general. To overcome this…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…
Understanding how learning algorithms shape the computational strategies that emerge in neural networks remains a fundamental challenge in machine intelligence. While network architectures receive extensive attention, the role of the…
Promoting behavioural diversity is critical for solving games with non-transitive dynamics where strategic cycles exist, and there is no consistent winner (e.g., Rock-Paper-Scissors). Yet, there is a lack of rigorous treatment for defining…
We examine a wide class of stochastic approximation algorithms for solving (stochastic) nonlinear problems on Riemannian manifolds. Such algorithms arise naturally in the study of Riemannian optimization, game theory and optimal transport,…
Logistic regression is a ubiquitous method for probabilistic classification. However, the effectiveness of logistic regression depends upon careful and relatively computationally expensive tuning, especially for the regularisation…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
We introduce a new shrinkage variable selection operator for linear models which we term the \emph{adaptive ridge selector} (ARiS). This approach is inspired by the \emph{relevance vector machine} (RVM), which uses a Bayesian hierarchical…