English
Related papers

Related papers: Value Mirror Descent for Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Discrete-action reinforcement learning algorithms often falter in tasks with high-dimensional discrete action spaces due to the vast number of possible actions. A recent advancement leverages value-decomposition, a concept from multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 David Ireland , Giovanni Montana

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of modern machine learning. Sometimes, there are many different potential gradient estimators that can be used. When so, choosing the one with the best tradeoff between cost and variance is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Tomas Geffner , Justin Domke

In recent years, attention has been focused on the relationship between black-box optimiza- tion problem and reinforcement learning problem. In this research, we propose the Mirror Descent Search (MDS) algorithm which is applicable both for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-15 Megumi Miyashita , Shiro Yano , Toshiyuki Kondo

We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

We provide faster randomized algorithms for computing an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in a discounted Markov decision process with $A_{\text{tot}}$-state-action pairs, bounded rewards, and discount factor $\gamma$. We provide an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Yujia Jin , Ishani Karmarkar , Aaron Sidford , Jiayi Wang

This paper is concerned with distributed stochastic multi-agent constrained optimization problem over time-varying network with a class of communication noise. This paper considers the problem in composite optimization setting which is more…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-20 Zhan Yu , Daniel W. C. Ho , Deming Yuan , Jie Liu

In this paper we consider convergence rate problems for stochastic strongly-convex optimization in the non-Euclidean sense with a constraint set over a time-varying multi-agent network. We propose two efficient non-Euclidean stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-23 Deming Yuan , Yiguang Hong , Daniel W. C. Ho , Guoping Jiang

Stochastic first-order methods for empirical risk minimization employ gradient approximations based on sampled data in lieu of exact gradients. Such constructions introduce noise into the learning dynamics, which can be corrected through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Sean Xiao , Sangwoo Park , Stefan Vlaski

In this paper, we propose Distributed Mirror Descent (DMD) algorithm for constrained convex optimization problems on a (strongly-)connected multi-agent network. We assume that each agent has a private objective function and a constraint…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-04-28 Chenguang Xi , Qiong Wu , Usman A. Khan

We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning (RL) -- a well-motivated setting of RL that aims at policy optimization using only historical data. Despite its wide applicability, theoretical understandings of offline RL, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Goran Banjac , John Lygeros

Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yunwen Lei , Zimeng Wang , Xiaoming Yuan

We consider risk-averse convex stochastic programs expressed in terms of extended polyhedral risk measures. We derive computable confidence intervals on the optimal value of such stochastic programs using the Robust Stochastic Approximation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-06 Vincent Guigues

Relative smoothness - a notion introduced by Birnbaum et al. (2011) and rediscovered by Bauschke et al. (2016) and Lu et al. (2016) - generalizes the standard notion of smoothness typically used in the analysis of gradient type methods. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-25 Filip Hanzely , Peter Richtárik

Singular value decomposition (SVD) is one of the most popular compression methods that approximate a target matrix with smaller matrices. However, standard SVD treats the parameters within the matrix with equal importance, which is a simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Ting Hua , Yen-Chang Hsu , Felicity Wang , Qian Lou , Yilin Shen , Hongxia Jin

This paper studies the convergence of the mirror descent algorithm for finite horizon stochastic control problems with measure-valued control processes. The control objective involves a convex regularisation function, denoted as $h$, with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-22 Bekzhan Kerimkulov , David Šiška , Łukasz Szpruch , Yufei Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous time and state/action spaces is often data-intensive and brittle under nuisance variability and shift, motivating methods that exploit value-preserving structures to stabilize and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zuyuan Zhang , Fei Xu Yu , Tian Lan

Value iteration is a fixed point iteration technique utilized to obtain the optimal value function and policy in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Here, a contraction operator is constructed and applied repeatedly to arrive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Dense vector retrieval is an important building block of modern machine learning systems, underlying applications ranging from semantic search to retrieval-augmented generation and knowledge-intensive reasoning. Beyond retrieving items that…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Hang Gao , Dong Deng , Yongfeng Zhang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo , Matteo Papini