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Related papers: Toward Efficient Gradient-Based Value Estimation

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With increasing scale in model and dataset size, the training of deep neural networks becomes a massive computational burden. One approach to speed up the training process is Selective Backprop. For this approach, we perform a forward pass…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Lukas Balles , Cedric Archambeau , Giovanni Zappella

The effectiveness of supervised learning techniques has made them ubiquitous in research and practice. In high-dimensional settings, supervised learning commonly relies on dimensionality reduction to improve performance and identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-11 Chang Liu , Bo Li , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Alina Oprea

Despite recent successes in Reinforcement Learning, value-based methods often suffer from high variance hindering performance. In this paper, we illustrate this in a continuous control setting where state of the art methods perform poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-24 Pierre Thodoroff , Nishanth Anand , Lucas Caccia , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is one of the most successful meta-learning techniques for few-shot learning. It uses gradient descent to learn commonalities between various tasks, enabling the model to learn the meta-initialization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Lin Ding , Peng Liu , Wenfeng Shen , Weijia Lu , Shengbo Chen

Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on high-resolution images is often bottlenecked by the cost of evaluating gradients of the loss on the finest spatial mesh. To address this, we propose Multiscale Gradient Estimation (MGE), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shadab Ahamed , Niloufar Zakariaei , Eldad Haber , Moshe Eliasof

We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm derived from a regularized linear-programming formulation of optimal control in MDPs. The method is closely related to the classic Relative Entropy Policy Search (REPS) algorithm of Peters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Joan Bas-Serrano , Sebastian Curi , Andreas Krause , Gergely Neu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely adopted to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks. However, existing methods often rely on execution-based or LLM-based Bradley-Terry reward models. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Han Weng , Puzhen Wu , Longjie Cui , Yi Zhan , Boyi Liu , Yuanfeng Song , Dun Zeng , Yingxiang Yang , Qianru Zhang , Dong Huang , Xiaoming Yin , Yang Sun , Xing Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

A non-Bayesian, regression-based or generalized least squares (GLS)-based approach is formally proposed to estimate a class of time-varying AR parameter models. This approach has partly been used by Ito et al. (2014, 2016a,b), and is proven…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-12-22 Mikio Ito , Akihiko Noda , Tatsuma Wada

Deep neural network (DNN) based approaches hold significant potential for reinforcement learning (RL) and have already shown remarkable gains over state-of-art methods in a number of applications. The effectiveness of DNN methods can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-01 Henghui Zhu , Feng Nan , Ioannis Paschalidis , Venkatesh Saligrama

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan

For the goal of automated design of high-performance deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methodology is becoming increasingly important for both academia and industries.Due to the costly stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Shengran Hu , Ran Cheng , Cheng He , Zhichao Lu , Jing Wang , Miao Zhang

We consider the task of low-multilinear-rank functional regression, i.e., learning a low-rank parametric representation of functions from scattered real-valued data. Our first contribution is the development and analysis of an efficient…

Computation · Statistics 2018-09-26 Alex A. Gorodetsky , John D. Jakeman

The task of estimating the gradient of a function in the presence of noise is central to several forms of reinforcement learning, including policy search methods. We present two techniques for reducing gradient estimation errors in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Gregory Lawrence , Noah Cowan , Stuart Russell

The computational cost of training multimodal large language models (MLLMs) grows rapidly with the number of processed tokens. Existing efficiency methods mainly target inference via token reduction or merging, offering limited benefits…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Chaoyu Li , Yogesh Kulkarni , Pooyan Fazli

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel

We propose randomized least-squares value iteration (RLSVI) -- a new reinforcement learning algorithm designed to explore and generalize efficiently via linearly parameterized value functions. We explain why versions of least-squares value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy , Zheng Wen

We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-18 Vikram Krishnamurthy , Felisa Vazquez Abad

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Dravyansh Sharma