Related papers: Distributional value gradients for stochastic envi…
Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation…
We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…
Differentiable environments have heralded new possibilities for learning control policies by offering rich differentiable information that facilitates gradient-based methods. In comparison to prevailing model-free reinforcement learning…
Generalization in partially observed markov decision processes (POMDPs) is critical for successful applications of visual reinforcement learning (VRL) in real scenarios. A widely used idea is to learn task-relevant representations that…
Various gradient compression schemes have been proposed to mitigate the communication cost in distributed training of large scale machine learning models. Sign-based methods, such as signSGD, have recently been gaining popularity because of…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…
Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) tackles sequential decision-making problems by creating agents that interacts with their environment. However, existing algorithms often view these problem as static, focusing on point estimates for model…
Autonomous cyber and cyber-physical systems need to perform decision-making, learning, and control in unknown environments. Such decision-making can be sensitive to multiple factors, including modeling errors, changes in costs, and impacts…
Classically, ML models trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are designed to minimize the average loss per example and use a distribution of training examples that remains {\em static} in the course of training. Research in recent…
We study a variation of vanilla stochastic gradient descent where the optimizer only has access to a Markovian sampling scheme. These schemes encompass applications that range from decentralized optimization with a random walker (token…
Value-decomposition methods, which reduce the difficulty of a multi-agent system by decomposing the joint state-action space into local observation-action spaces, have become popular in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL).…
Stochastic computation graphs (SCGs) provide a formalism to represent structured optimization problems arising in artificial intelligence, including supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Previous work has shown that an…
Reinforcement learning has been successful across several applications in which agents have to learn to act in environments with sparse feedback. However, despite this empirical success there is still a lack of theoretical understanding of…
This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…
There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training…
Gradient-based methods for value estimation in reinforcement learning have favorable stability properties, but they are typically much slower than Temporal Difference (TD) learning methods. We study the root causes of this slowness and show…
In reinforcement learning (RL), aligning agent behavior with specific objectives typically requires careful design of the reward function, which can be challenging when the desired objectives are complex. In this work, we propose an…