Related papers: Fast Stochastic Policy Gradient: Negative Momentum…

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are currently being used as function approximators in many state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been shown to drastically reduce the energy…

We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…

Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…

We consider the problem of designing sample efficient learning algorithms for infinite horizon discounted reward Markov Decision Process. Specifically, we propose the Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (ANPG) algorithm that utilizes an…

Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is a popular variance reduction technique for accelerating stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide a first analysis of the method for solving a class of linear inverse problems in the lens…

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Maximum marginal likelihood estimation (MMLE) can be formulated as the optimization of a free energy functional. From this viewpoint, the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm admits a natural interpretation as a coordinate descent method…

Modern optimization algorithms that incorporate momentum and adaptive step-size offer improved performance in numerous challenging deep learning tasks. However, their effectiveness is often highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters,…

We propose a memory efficient method, named Stochastic Backpropagation (SBP), for training deep neural networks on videos. It is based on the finding that gradients from incomplete execution for backpropagation can still effectively train…

We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…

Despite the recent growth of theoretical studies and empirical successes of neural networks, gradient backpropagation is still the most widely used algorithm for training such networks. On the one hand, we have deterministic or full…

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

This letter investigates a sum rate maximizationproblem in an intelligent reflective surface (IRS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink network. Specif-ically, the sum rate of all the users is maximized by…

Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…

An algorithm is presented for momentum gradient descent optimization based on the first-order differential equation of the Newtonian dynamics. The fictitious mass is introduced to the dynamics of momentum for regularizing the adaptive…

Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…

Adaptive gradient methods, which adopt historical gradient information to automatically adjust the learning rate, despite the nice property of fast convergence, have been observed to generalize worse than stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

In this paper we study several classes of stochastic optimization algorithms enriched with heavy ball momentum. Among the methods studied are: stochastic gradient descent, stochastic Newton, stochastic proximal point and stochastic dual…

The robust constrained Markov decision process (RCMDP) is a recent task-modelling framework for reinforcement learning that incorporates behavioural constraints and that provides robustness to errors in the transition dynamics model through…