Related papers: Resetting the Optimizer in Deep RL: An Empirical S…
Deep learning optimizers are optimization algorithms that enable deep neural networks to learn. The effectiveness of learning is highly dependent on the optimizer employed in the training process. Alongside the rapid advancement of deep…
Scaling issues are mundane yet irritating for practitioners of reinforcement learning. Error scales vary across domains, tasks, and stages of learning; sometimes by many orders of magnitude. This can be detrimental to learning speed and…
Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has seen great advancements in the past few years. Nevertheless, the consensus among the RL community is that currently used methods, despite all their benefits, suffer from extreme data inefficiency, especially…
Modern adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam and its variants, have emerged as the most widely used tools in deep learning over recent years. These algorithms offer automatic mechanisms for dynamically adjusting the update step based…
Adaptive gradient optimization methods, such as Adam, are prevalent in training deep neural networks across diverse machine learning tasks due to their ability to achieve faster convergence. However, these methods often suffer from…
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…
Gradient descent based optimization methods are the methods of choice to train deep neural networks in machine learning. Beyond the standard gradient descent method, also suitable modified variants of standard gradient descent involving…
Specifying a Reinforcement Learning (RL) task involves choosing a suitable planning horizon, which is typically modeled by a discount factor. It is known that applying RL algorithms with a lower discount factor can act as a regularizer,…
In the recent years, various gradient descent algorithms including the methods of gradient descent, gradient descent with momentum, adaptive gradient (AdaGrad), root-mean-square propagation (RMSProp) and adaptive moment estimation (Adam)…
Most of the recent deep reinforcement learning advances take an RL-centric perspective and focus on refinements of the training objective. We diverge from this view and show we can recover the performance of these developments not by…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) for training Large Language Models is notoriously unstable. While recent studies attribute this to "training inference mismatch stemming" from inconsistent hybrid engines, standard remedies, such as Importance…
In distributed optimization, the practical problem-solving performance is essentially sensitive to algorithm selection, parameter setting, problem type and data pattern. Thus, it is often laborious to acquire a highly efficient method for a…
The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to estimate and/or optimise the value function. However, unlike supervised learning, no teacher or oracle is available to provide the true value function. Instead, the majority of…
Choosing the optimizer is considered to be among the most crucial design decisions in deep learning, and it is not an easy one. The growing literature now lists hundreds of optimization methods. In the absence of clear theoretical guidance…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in solving complex tasks through its integration with deep neural networks (DNNs) as function approximators. However, the reliance on DNNs has introduced a new challenge…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known…
We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics. Previous…
We introduce a general method for improving the convergence rate of gradient-based optimizers that is easy to implement and works well in practice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a range of optimization problems by…
We present a class of novel optimisers for training neural networks that makes use of the Riemannian metric naturally induced when the loss landscape is embedded in higher-dimensional space. This is the same metric that underlies common…