Related papers: Toward Efficient Gradient-Based Value Estimation
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…
We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a critical method in machine learning and statistics, underpinning the recent success of Bayesian deep learning. The natural gradient is an essential component of efficient VB estimation, but it is prohibitively…
In this paper, we study policy evaluation in continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL), where the state follows an unknown stochastic differential equation (SDE), but only discrete-time data are available. We first highlight that the…
Gradient regularization (GR) is a method that penalizes the gradient norm of the training loss during training. While some studies have reported that GR can improve generalization performance, little attention has been paid to it from the…
Gradient-based hyperparameter optimization has earned a widespread popularity in the context of few-shot meta-learning, but remains broadly impractical for tasks with long horizons (many gradient steps), due to memory scaling and gradient…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…
Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) intend to ensure robustness with respect to changing or adversarial system behavior. In this framework, transitions are modeled as arbitrary elements of a known and properly structured uncertainty…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged as a powerful tool for generating high-fidelity data. However, the main bottleneck of existing approaches is the lack of supervision on the generator training, which often results in…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…
We explore the use of policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning for quantum control via energy landscape shaping of XX-Heisenberg spin chains in a model agnostic fashion. Their performance is compared to finding controllers using…
We describe an approximate dynamic programming approach to compute lower bounds on the optimal value function for a discrete time, continuous space, infinite horizon setting. The approach iteratively constructs a family of lower bounding…
We present practical Levenberg-Marquardt variants of Gauss-Newton and natural gradient methods for solving non-convex optimization problems that arise in training deep neural networks involving enormous numbers of variables and huge data…
Stochastic gradient methods are central to large-scale learning, but they treat mini-batch gradients as unbiased estimators, which classical decision theory shows are inadmissible in high dimensions. We formulate gradient computation as a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms still suffer from high sample complexity despite outstanding recent successes. The need for intensive interactions with the environment is especially observed in many widely popular policy gradient…
Backpropagation is the default learning rule for artificial neural networks and is often treated as the settled approach whenever differentiability is available. In this work, we revisit this convention through a theoretical lens of sample…
Training Artificial Neural Networks poses a challenging and critical problem in machine learning. Despite the effectiveness of gradient-based learning methods, such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), in training neural networks, they do…
While backpropagation--reverse-mode automatic differentiation--has been extraordinarily successful in deep learning, it requires two passes (forward and backward) through the neural network and the storage of intermediate activations.…