Related papers: Accelerating Value Iteration with Anchoring
We develop a fitted value iteration (FVI) method to compute bicausal optimal transport (OT) where couplings have an adapted structure. Based on the dynamic programming formulation, FVI adopts a function class to approximate the value…
Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure in financial engineering, energy systems, and supply chain management. In these domains, Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a long-run CVaR criterion effectively mitigate cost…
Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…
In this work, we study the sample complexity problem of risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a generative model, where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance level $\tau$ at each step, a…
We propose a novel method, namely the accelerated mirror-prox (AMP) method, for computing the weak solutions of a class of deterministic and stochastic monotone variational inequalities (VI). The main idea of this algorithm is to…
Variational Inference (VI) offers a method for approximating intractable likelihoods. In neural VI, inference of approximate posteriors is commonly done using an encoder. Alternatively, encoderless VI offers a framework for learning…
Fast-converging algorithms are a contemporary requirement in reinforcement learning. In the context of linear function approximation, the magnitude of the smallest eigenvalue of the key matrix is a major factor reflecting the convergence…
Classical value iteration approaches are not applicable to environments with continuous states and actions. For such environments, the states and actions are usually discretized, which leads to an exponential increase in computational…
In this paper, we develop a new type of accelerated algorithms to solve some classes of maximally monotone equations as well as monotone inclusions. Instead of using Nesterov's accelerating approach, our methods rely on a so-called…
This paper studies value iteration for infinite horizon contracting Markov decision processes under convexity assumptions and when the state space is uncountable. The original value iteration is replaced with a more tractable form and the…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Long-run average rewards provide a mathematically elegant formalism for expressing long term performance. Value iteration (VI)…
Our work tackles the computational challenges of contrastive learning methods, particularly for the pretraining of Vision Transformers (ViTs). Despite the effectiveness of contrastive learning, the substantial computational resources…
The objective in this paper is to obtain fast converging reinforcement learning algorithms to approximate solutions to the problem of discounted cost optimal stopping in an irreducible, uniformly ergodic Markov chain, evolving on a compact…
Approximate value iteration (AVI) is a family of algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) that aims to obtain an approximation of the optimal value function. Generally, AVI algorithms implement an iterated procedure where each step…
Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…
For continuous action spaces, actor-critic methods are widely used in online reinforcement learning (RL). However, unlike RL algorithms for discrete actions, which generally model the optimal value function using the Bellman optimality…
Reliable long-horizon value prediction is difficult in offline reinforcement learning because fitted value methods combine bootstrapping, function approximation, and distribution shift, while standard guarantees often require Bellman…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
This paper develops an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at recovering a reward function from the observed actions of an agent. We introduce a strategy to flexibly handle different types of actions with two approximations of…
A classic solution technique for Markov decision processes (MDP) and stochastic games (SG) is value iteration (VI). Due to its good practical performance, this approximative approach is typically preferred over exact techniques, even though…