Related papers: Fast Stochastic Policy Gradient: Negative Momentum…
Various acceleration approaches for Policy Gradient (PG) have been analyzed within the realm of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of the widely used momentum-based acceleration method on PG remains largely…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…
It is well-known that stochastic gradient noise (SGN) acts as implicit regularization for deep learning and is essentially important for both optimization and generalization of deep networks. Some works attempted to artificially simulate…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…
Reinforcement learning is essential for neural architecture search and hyperparameter optimization, but the conventional approaches impede widespread use due to prohibitive time and computational costs. Inspired by DeepSeek-V3 multi-token…
Momentum based stochastic gradient methods such as heavy ball (HB) and Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (NAG) method are widely used in practice for training deep networks and other supervised learning models, as they often provide…
We combine two advanced ideas widely used in optimization for machine learning: shuffling strategy and momentum technique to develop a novel shuffling gradient-based method with momentum, coined Shuffling Momentum Gradient (SMG), for…
Momentum plays a crucial role in stochastic gradient-based optimization algorithms for accelerating or improving training deep neural networks (DNNs). In deep learning practice, the momentum is usually weighted by a well-calibrated…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular and efficient for large-scale reinforcement learning due to their relative stability and incremental nature. In recent years, the empirical success of PG methods has led to the development of a…
In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Policy Gradient (STORM-PG), which operates a SARAH-type stochastic recursive variance-reduced policy gradient in an exponential moving average fashion.…
The use of momentum in stochastic gradient methods has become a widespread practice in machine learning. Different variants of momentum, including heavy-ball momentum, Nesterov's accelerated gradient (NAG), and quasi-hyperbolic momentum…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…
Stochastic optimization is a cornerstone of modern machine learning. This paper studies the generalization performance of two classical stochastic optimization algorithms: stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Nesterov's accelerated…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…
Variance reduction is a crucial tool for improving the slow convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Only a few variance-reduced methods, however, have yet been shown to directly benefit from Nesterov's acceleration techniques to match…
While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is the dominant algorithm in many optimization scenarios, including convex optimization instances and non-convex neural network training. Yet, in the stochastic setting, momentum interferes…