Related papers: Stochastic Dimension-reduced Second-order Methods …
Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…
In this paper, we propose a Dimension-Reduced Second-Order Method (DRSOM) for convex and nonconvex (unconstrained) optimization. Under a trust-region-like framework, our method preserves the convergence of the second-order method while…
The dual challenges of prohibitive communication overhead and the impracticality of gradient computation due to data privacy or black-box constraints in distributed systems motivate this work on communication-constrained gradient-free…
In this paper, we study a second-order approach to policy optimization in reinforcement learning. Existing second-order methods often suffer from suboptimal sample complexity or rely on unrealistic assumptions about importance sampling. To…
In this paper, we propose a distributed stochastic second-order proximal method that enables agents in a network to cooperatively minimize the sum of their local loss functions without any centralized coordination. The proposed algorithm,…
Recently, there has been a growing interest in distributionally robust optimization (DRO) as a principled approach to data-driven decision making. In this paper, we consider a distributionally robust two-stage stochastic optimization…
We develop Policy Gradient with Second-Order Momentum (PG-SOM), a lightweight second-order optimisation scheme for reinforcement-learning policies. PG-SOM augments the classical REINFORCE update with two exponentially weighted statistics: a…
Moment-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides an optimization framework to integrate statistical information with traditional optimization approaches. Under this framework, one assumes that the underlying joint…
In this paper, we develop and analyze sub-sampled trust-region methods for solving finite-sum optimization problems. These methods employ subsampling strategies to approximate the gradient and Hessian of the objective function,…
We provide the first study of the problem of finding differentially private (DP) second-order stationary points (SOSP) in stochastic (non-convex) minimax optimization. Existing literature either focuses only on first-order stationary points…
A stochastic second-order trust region method is proposed, which can be viewed as a second-order extension of the trust-region-ish (TRish) algorithm proposed by Curtis et al. (INFORMS J. Optim. 1(3) 200-220, 2019). In each iteration, a…
Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. This paper proposes $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ algorithm: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent. In $\mathtt{VRMPO}$, a novel…
We develop a new algorithm for non-convex stochastic optimization that finds an $\epsilon$-critical point in the optimal $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector product computations. Our algorithm uses Hessian-vector…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms have been widely applied in minimization problems when the loss functions and/or the gradient information are only accessible through noisy evaluations. Stochastic gradient (SG) descent---a…
We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
Variance reduction techniques are designed to decrease the sampling variance, thereby accelerating convergence rates of first-order (FO) and zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods. However, in composite optimization problems, ZO methods…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…
We investigate the problem of finding second-order stationary points (SOSP) in differentially private (DP) stochastic non-convex optimization. Existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) inaccurate convergence error rate due to…