Related papers: Does This Gradient Spark Joy?
In a typical school choice application, the students have strict preferences over the schools while the schools have coarse priorities over the students based on their distance and their enrolled siblings. The outcome of a centralized…
Pricing financial derivatives on quantum computers typically includes quantum arithmetic components which contribute heavily to the quantum resources required by the corresponding circuits. In this manuscript, we introduce a method based on…
In this paper, we explore how directly pretraining a value model simplifies and stabilizes reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In reinforcement learning, value estimation is the key to policy optimization, distinct from…
Safety post-training can improve the harmfulness and policy compliance of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it may also reduce general utility, a phenomenon often described as the \emph{alignment tax}. We study this trade-off through the…
We propose a cross-fitted debiasing device for policy learning from offline data. A key consequence of the resulting learning principle is $\sqrt N$ regret even for policy classes with complexity greater than Donsker, provided a…
Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…
This article is in the context of gradient compression. Gradient compression is a popular technique for mitigating the communication bottleneck observed when training large machine learning models in a distributed manner using…
In unconstrained optimisation on an Euclidean space, to prove convergence in Gradient Descent processes (GD) $x_{n+1}=x_n-\delta _n \nabla f(x_n)$ it usually is required that the learning rates $\delta _n$'s are bounded: $\delta _n\leq…
In this paper, we analyze the optimization landscape of gradient descent methods for static output feedback (SOF) control of discrete-time linear time-invariant systems with quadratic cost. The SOF setting can be quite common, for example,…
This paper introduces EnergyFlow, a framework that unifies generative action modeling with inverse reinforcement learning by parameterizing a scalar energy function whose gradient is the denoising field. We establish that under…
We consider a retailer running a switchback experiment for the price of a single product, with infinite supply. In each period, the seller chooses a price $p$ from a set of predefined prices that consist of a reference price and a few…
Backpropagation is the default learning rule for artificial neural networks and is often treated as the settled approach whenever differentiability is available. In this work, we revisit this convention through a theoretical lens of sample…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a standard approach to privacy-preserving learning based on per-example clipping, subsampling, Gaussian perturbation, and privacy accounting. Classical DP-SGD releases a noisy…
Generating adversarial examples at scale is a core primitive for robustness evaluation, adversarial training, and red-teaming, yet even "fast" attacks such as FGSM remain throughput-limited by the cost of a backward pass. We introduce a…
We consider contextual bandit learning under distribution shift when reward vectors are ordered according to a given preference cone. We propose an adaptive-discretization and optimistic elimination based policy that self-tunes to the…
Learning reward models from pairwise comparisons is a fundamental component in a number of domains, including autonomous control, conversational agents, and recommendation systems, as part of a broad goal of aligning automated decisions…
We consider deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) in the context of reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. To enhance exploration, we introduce a search procedure, \emph{${\epsilon}{t}$-greedy}, which generates exploratory options…
We introduce ProxSkip -- a surprisingly simple and provably efficient method for minimizing the sum of a smooth ($f$) and an expensive nonsmooth proximable ($\psi$) function. The canonical approach to solving such problems is via the…
While real quantum devices have been increasingly used to conduct research focused on achieving quantum advantage or quantum utility in recent years, executing deep quantum circuits or performing quantum machine learning with large-scale…