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Driven by the need to solve increasingly complex optimization problems in signal processing and machine learning, there has been increasing interest in understanding the behavior of gradient-descent algorithms in non-convex environments.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-04 Stefan Vlaski , Ali H. Sayed

We present a variational method for online state estimation and parameter learning in state-space models (SSMs), a ubiquitous class of latent variable models for sequential data. As per standard batch variational techniques, we use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Andrew Campbell , Yuyang Shi , Tom Rainforth , Arnaud Doucet

Stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) has played an important role in large-scale Bayesian learning, with well-developed theoretical convergence properties. In such applications of SG-MCMC, it is becoming increasingly popular to employ…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-10-24 Changyou Chen , Nan Ding , Chunyuan Li , Yizhe Zhang , Lawrence Carin

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-03 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante , Ebisa Wollega

We propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) formulation for training continuous-time score-based diffusion models for generative AI to generate samples that maximize reward functions while keeping the generated distributions close to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xuefeng Gao , Jiale Zha , Xun Yu Zhou

Value function learning plays a central role in many state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning algorithms. Many popular algorithms like Q-learning do not optimize any objective function, but are fixed-point iterations of some variant of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Yihao Feng , Lihong Li , Qiang Liu

We consider the problem of learning models for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We theoretically demonstrate that proper value equivalence, a method of learning models which can be used to plan optimally in the risk-neutral setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Tyler Kastner , Murat A. Erdogdu , Amir-massoud Farahmand

A fairly reliable trend in deep reinforcement learning is that the performance scales with the number of parameters, provided a complimentary scaling in amount of training data. As the appetite for large models increases, it is imperative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Bogdan Mazoure , Walter Talbott , Miguel Angel Bautista , Devon Hjelm , Alexander Toshev , Josh Susskind

We present an algorithm for learning decision trees using stochastic gradient information as the source of supervision. In contrast to previous approaches to gradient-based tree learning, our method operates in the incremental learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-25 Henry Gouk , Bernhard Pfahringer , Eibe Frank

We propose a novel method to directly learn a stochastic transition operator whose repeated application provides generated samples. Traditional undirected graphical models approach this problem indirectly by learning a Markov chain model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-08 Anirudh Goyal , Nan Rosemary Ke , Surya Ganguli , Yoshua Bengio

This paper proposes a distributed stochastic algorithm with variance reduction for general smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization, which has wide applications in signal processing and machine learning communities. In distributed setting,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-23 Xia Jiang , Xianlin Zeng , Jian Sun , Jie Chen

In this paper, we devise a distributional framework on actor-critic as a solution to distributional instability, action type restriction, and conflation between samples and statistics. We propose a new method that minimizes the Cram\'er…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Daniel Wontae Nam , Younghoon Kim , Chan Y. Park

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet current methods face key challenges in resource allocation and policy optimization dynamics: (i) uniform rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yangyi Fang , Jiaye Lin , Xiaoliang Fu , Cong Qin , Haolin Shi , Chaowen Hu , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

Distributed machine learning has recently become a critical paradigm for training large models on vast datasets. We examine the stochastic optimization problem for deep learning within synchronous parallel computing environments under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Yoni Choukroun , Shlomi Azoulay , Pavel Kisilev

Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions is a fundamental challenge in computational physics and machine learning. While score-based and variational methods have achieved success in continuous domains, extending them to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Lei Li , Zhen Wang , Lishuo Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential for optimizing multi-vehicle cooperative driving strategies through the state-action-reward feedback loop, but it still faces challenges such as low sample efficiency. This paper proposes a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Ye Han , Lijun Zhang , Dejian Meng , Zhuang Zhang

Policy gradient methods are appealing in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimate. To reduce the variance, the state value function is applied commonly. However, the effect of the state value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-06 Jiaming Guo , Rui Zhang , Xishan Zhang , Shaohui Peng , Qi Yi , Zidong Du , Xing Hu , Qi Guo , Yunji Chen