Related papers: Stabilizing Policy Gradients for Stochastic Differ…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
The study of optimal control problems under uncertainty plays an important role in scientific numerical simulations. This class of optimization problems is strongly utilized in engineering, biology and finance. In this paper, a stochastic…
In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
We study stochastic optimal control of rough stochastic differential equations (RSDEs). This is in the spirit of the pathwise control problem (Lions--Souganidis 1998, Buckdahn--Ma 2007; also Davis--Burstein 1992), with renewed interest and…
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…
This paper studies the convergence of clipped stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms with decision-dependent data distribution. Our setting is motivated by privacy preserving optimization algorithms that interact with performative…
Distributed descent-based methods are an essential toolset to solving optimization problems in multi-agent system scenarios. Here the agents seek to optimize a global objective function through mutual cooperation. Oftentimes, cooperation is…
Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are increasingly used in longitudinal data analysis, compartmental models, growth modelling, and other applications in a number of disciplines. Parameter estimation, however, currently requires…
In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…
We study identifiability of stochastic differential equations (SDE) under multiple interventions. Our results give the first provable bounds for unique recovery of SDE parameters given samples from their stationary distributions. We give…
In Score based Generative Modeling (SGMs), the state-of-the-art in generative modeling, stochastic reverse processes are known to perform better than their deterministic counterparts. This paper delves into the heart of this phenomenon,…
We study how the behavior of deep policy gradient algorithms reflects the conceptual framework motivating their development. To this end, we propose a fine-grained analysis of state-of-the-art methods based on key elements of this…
Neural Stochastic Differential Equations (Neural SDEs) have emerged as powerful mesh-free generative models for continuous stochastic processes, with critical applications in fields such as finance, physics, and biology. Previous…
We employ constraints to control the parameter space of deep neural networks throughout training. The use of customized, appropriately designed constraints can reduce the vanishing/exploding gradients problem, improve smoothness of…
We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…
We present a methodology to deploy the stochastic policy gradient method, using actor-critic techniques, when the optimal policy is approximated using a parametric optimization problem, allowing one to enforce safety via hard constraints.…
We consider the inference problem for parameters in stochastic differential equation models from discrete time observations (e.g. experimental or simulation data). Specifically, we study the case where one does not have access to…
We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has proven to be remarkably effective in optimizing deep neural networks that employ ever-larger numbers of parameters. Yet, improving the efficiency of large-scale optimization remains a vital and highly…