Related papers: Distributional value gradients for stochastic envi…
Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are a powerful class of generative models, but their training requires computing a gradient that, unlike supervised backpropagation on typical loss functions, is notoriously difficult even to…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with numerical regression under long-tailed target distributions. Token-level supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and point-wise regression rewards bias learning toward high-density regions,…
We present two elegant solutions for modeling continuous-time dynamics, in a novel model-based reinforcement learning (RL) framework for semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs), using neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Our models…
We address the problem of safely learning controlled stochastic dynamics from discrete-time trajectory observations, ensuring system trajectories remain within predefined safe regions during both training and deployment. Safety-critical…
Training deep reinforcement learning agents on environments with multiple levels / scenes from the same task, has become essential for many applications aiming to achieve generalization and domain transfer from simulation to the real world.…
We introduce a novel training principle for probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose…
In this paper, we propose a new framework to study distributed optimization problems with stochastic gradients by employing a multi-agent system with continuous-time dynamics. Here the goal of the agents is to cooperatively minimize the sum…
We propose Sobolev-regularized Maximum Mean Discrepancy (SrMMD) gradient flow, a regularized variant of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) gradient flow based on a gradient penalty on the witness function. The proposed regularization mitigates…
We consider an agent who is involved in a Markov decision process and receives a vector of outcomes every round. Her objective is to maximize a global concave reward function on the average vectorial outcome. The problem models applications…
We propose a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approach for noisy time-dependent gate optimization with improved sample complexity over model-free RL. Sample complexity is the number of controller interactions with the physical…
There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…
Stochastic gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) offers a scalable alternative to traditional MCMC, by constructing an unbiased estimate of the gradient of the log-posterior with a small, uniformly-weighted subsample of the data. While efficient to…
Learning continuous control in high-dimensional sparse reward settings, such as robotic manipulation, is a challenging problem due to the number of samples often required to obtain accurate optimal value and policy estimates. While many…
We consider the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem with spectral risk-based uncertainty set and $f$-divergence penalty. This formulation includes common risk-sensitive learning objectives such as regularized condition…
This paper introduces novel Bellman mappings (B-Maps) for value iteration (VI) in distributed reinforcement learning (DRL), where agents are deployed over an undirected, connected graph/network with arbitrary topology -- but without a…
The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…
Advances in robot learning have enabled robots to generate skills for a variety of tasks. Yet, robot learning is typically sample inefficient, struggles to learn from data sources exhibiting varied behaviors, and does not naturally…
We study distributed training of deep learning models in time-constrained environments. We propose a new algorithm that periodically pulls workers towards the center variable computed as a weighted average of workers, where the weights are…
Two-time-scale optimization is a framework introduced in Zeng et al. (2024) that abstracts a range of policy evaluation and policy optimization problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Akin to bi-level optimization under a particular type…