Related papers: Accelerating Value Iteration with Anchoring
We study stochastic convex optimization subjected to linear equality constraints. Traditional Stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers and its Nesterov's acceleration scheme can only achieve ergodic O(1/\sqrt{K}) convergence…
Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…
Optimizing the learning rate remains a critical challenge in machine learning, essential for achieving model stability and efficient convergence. The Vector Auxiliary Variable (VAV) algorithm introduces a novel energy-based self-adjustable…
We develop an interior-point approach to solve constrained variational inequality (cVI) problems. Inspired by the efficacy of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) method in the single-objective context, we generalize ADMM…
Solving stochastic games with the reachability objective is a fundamental problem, especially in quantitative verification and synthesis. For this purpose, bounded value iteration (BVI) attracts attention as an efficient iterative method.…
Since their introduction, anchoring methods in extragradient-type saddlepoint problems have inspired a flurry of research due to their ability to provide order-optimal rates of accelerated convergence in very general problem settings. Such…
Tail-end risk measures such as static conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) are used in safety-critical applications to prevent rare, yet catastrophic events. Unlike risk-neutral objectives, the static CVaR of the return depends on entire…
We study the general approach to accelerating the convergence of the most widely used solution method of Markov decision processes with the total expected discounted reward. Inspired by the monotone behavior of the contraction mappings in…
This paper revisits the recently proposed reward centering algorithms including simple reward centering (SRC) and value-based reward centering (VRC), and points out that SRC is indeed the reward centering, while VRC is essentially Bellman…
This paper applies the authors' recent results on asynchronous stochastic approximation (SA) in the Borkar-Meyn framework to reinforcement learning in average-reward semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs). We establish the convergence of an…
Advantage Learning (AL) seeks to increase the action gap between the optimal action and its competitors, so as to improve the robustness to estimation errors. However, the method becomes problematic when the optimal action induced by the…
Critic-free reinforcement learning methods, particularly group policies, have attracted considerable attention for their efficiency in complex tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on multiple sampling and comparisons within the policy…
One of the most widely used methods for solving average cost MDP problems is the value iteration method. This method, however, is often computationally impractical and restricted in size of solvable MDP problems. We propose acceleration…
One of the most natural approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation is value iteration, which inductively generates approximations to the optimal value function by solving a sequence of regression problems. To…
Nesterov's accelerated gradient methods (AGM) have been successfully applied in many machine learning areas. However, their empirical performance on training max-margin models has been inferior to existing specialized solvers. In this…
Boosting is one of the most significant advances in machine learning for classification and regression. In its original and computationally flexible version, boosting seeks to minimize empirically a loss function in a greedy fashion. The…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
Value iteration is a fixed point iteration technique utilized to obtain the optimal value function and policy in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Here, a contraction operator is constructed and applied repeatedly to arrive…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…
The Vector AutoRegressive Moving Average (VARMA) model is fundamental to the theory of multivariate time series; however, identifiability issues have led practitioners to abandon it in favor of the simpler but more restrictive Vector…