Related papers: Fast Stochastic Policy Gradient: Negative Momentum…
Heavy ball momentum is crucial in accelerating (stochastic) gradient-based optimization algorithms for machine learning. Existing heavy ball momentum is usually weighted by a uniform hyperparameter, which relies on excessive tuning.…
Modern machine learning is trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD), whose performance critically depends on how the learning rate (LR) is adjusted and decreased over time. Yet existing LR regimes may be intricate, or need to tune one…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are the most used algorithms in machine learning applications. In particular, SGD with adaptive learning rates and momentum is the industry standard to train deep networks. Despite the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…
Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…
In this paper, we propose Nesterov Accelerated Shuffling Gradient (NASG), a new algorithm for the convex finite-sum minimization problems. Our method integrates the traditional Nesterov's acceleration momentum with different shuffling…
In this paper, we present a unified algorithm for stochastic optimization that makes use of a "momentum" term; in other words, the stochastic gradient depends not only on the current true gradient of the objective function, but also on the…
Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) methods have become fundamental optimization tools in machine learning, combining the computational efficiency of stochastic gradients with the acceleration benefits of momentum. Despite…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems. They rely on fresh on-policy data, making them sample-inefficient and requiring…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…
Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
We consider a setting involving $N$ agents, where each agent interacts with an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The agents' MDPs differ in their reward functions, capturing heterogeneous objectives/tasks. The…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…
We consider gradient descent with `momentum', a widely used method for loss function minimization in machine learning. This method is often used with `Nesterov acceleration', meaning that the gradient is evaluated not at the current…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…
Variance reduction is a simple and effective technique that accelerates convex (or non-convex) stochastic optimization. Among existing variance reduction methods, SVRG and SAGA adopt unbiased gradient estimators and are the most popular…
We propose a framework, called neural-progressive hedging (NP), that leverages stochastic programming during the online phase of executing a reinforcement learning (RL) policy. The goal is to ensure feasibility with respect to constraints…