Related papers: Stabilizing Policy Gradients for Stochastic Differ…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
We develop policy gradients methods for stochastic control with exit time in a model-free setting. We propose two types of algorithms for learning either directly the optimal policy or by learning alternately the value function (critic) and…
Applications in quantitative finance such as optimal trade execution, risk management of options, and optimal asset allocation involve the solution of high dimensional and nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). The connection…
We introduce a mathematically rigorous framework based on rough path theory to model stochastic spiking neural networks (SSNNs) as stochastic differential equations with event discontinuities (Event SDEs) and driven by c\`adl\`ag rough…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
Neural Stochastic Differential Equations (NSDEs) model the drift and diffusion functions of a stochastic process as neural networks. While NSDEs are known to make accurate predictions, their uncertainty quantification properties have been…
Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are established tools to model physical phenomena whose dynamics are affected by random noise. By estimating parameters of an SDE intrinsic randomness of a system around its drift can be identified…
We develop the method of stochastic modified equations (SME), in which stochastic gradient algorithms are approximated in the weak sense by continuous-time stochastic differential equations. We exploit the continuous formulation together…
Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard approach to adapting pretrained knowledge to improve the accuracy on new sparse, imbalance datasets. However, issues arise when optimization falls into a collapsed state, where the model…
Optimizing over the stationary distribution of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) is computationally challenging. A new forward propagation algorithm has been recently proposed for the online optimization of SDEs. The algorithm solves…
Inspired by the ubiquitous use of differential equations to model continuous dynamics across diverse scientific and engineering domains, we propose a novel and intuitive approach to continuous sequence modeling. Our method interprets…
Despite the success achieved by the analysis of supervised learning algorithms in the framework of statistical mechanics, reinforcement learning has remained largely untouched. Here we move towards closing the gap by analyzing the dynamics…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
Scaling deep reinforcement learning networks is challenging and often results in degraded performance, yet the root causes of this failure mode remain poorly understood. Several recent works have proposed mechanisms to address this, but…
Realistic physical phenomena exhibit random fluctuations across many scales in the input and output processes. Models of these phenomena require stochastic PDEs. For three-dimensional coupled (vector-valued) stochastic PDEs (SPDEs), for…
We consider the problem of learning control policies in discrete-time stochastic systems which guarantee that the system stabilizes within some specified stabilization region with probability~$1$. Our approach is based on the novel notion…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…
We discover restrained numerical instabilities in current training practices of deep networks with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and its variants. We show numerical error (on the order of the smallest floating point bit and thus the…