Related papers: Policy Gradient with Second Order Momentum
In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…
Natural gradient descent is an optimization method traditionally motivated from the perspective of information geometry, and works well for many applications as an alternative to stochastic gradient descent. In this paper we critically…
Momentum methods, such as Polyak's Heavy Ball, are the standard for training deep networks but suffer from curvature-induced bias in stochastic settings, limiting convergence to suboptimal $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ rates. Existing…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
The success of deep learning can be attributed to various factors such as increase in computational power, large datasets, deep convolutional neural networks, optimizers etc. Particularly, the choice of optimizer affects the generalization,…
Standard gradient descent methods are susceptible to a range of issues that can impede training, such as high correlations and different scaling in parameter space.These difficulties can be addressed by second-order approaches that apply a…
We present a novel approach to accelerate stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by utilizing curvature information obtained from Hessian-vector products or finite differences of parameters and gradients, similar to the BFGS algorithm. Our…
Pruning remains an effective strategy for reducing both the costs and environmental impact associated with deploying large neural networks (NNs) while maintaining performance. Classical methods, such as OBD (LeCun et al., 1989) and OBS…
Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…
We propose a fast second-order method that can be used as a drop-in replacement for current deep learning solvers. Compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it only requires two additional forward-mode automatic differentiation…
We show that on-policy policy gradient (PG) and its variance reduction variants can be derived by taking finite difference of function evaluations supplied by estimators from the importance sampling (IS) family for off-policy evaluation…
In the paper, we design a novel Bregman gradient policy optimization framework for reinforcement learning based on Bregman divergences and momentum techniques. Specifically, we propose a Bregman gradient policy optimization (BGPO) algorithm…
Second-order information -- such as curvature or data covariance -- is critical for optimisation, diagnostics, and robustness. However, in many modern settings, only the gradients are observable. We show that the gradients alone can reveal…
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'…
This paper proposes a family of online second order methods for possibly non-convex stochastic optimizations based on the theory of preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD), which can be regarded as an enhance stochastic Newton…
Second-order information is valuable for many applications but challenging to compute. Several works focus on computing or approximating Hessian diagonals, but even this simplification introduces significant additional costs compared to…
Natural gradients have long been studied in deep reinforcement learning due to their fast convergence properties and covariant weight updates. However, computing natural gradients requires inversion of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) at…
We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…
First order methods, which solely rely on gradient information, are commonly used in diverse machine learning (ML) and data analysis (DA) applications. This is attributed to the simplicity of their implementations, as well as low…
Momentum-based gradients are essential for optimizing advanced machine learning models, as they not only accelerate convergence but also advance optimizers to escape stationary points. While most state-of-the-art momentum techniques utilize…