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Attention mechanisms have revolutionized several domains of artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing and computer vision, by enabling models to selectively focus on relevant parts of the input data. While recent work has…
We study the problem of policy optimization for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes with softmax policy and nonlinear function approximation trained with policy gradient algorithms. We concentrate on the training dynamics…
This paper studies the convergence properties of a family of Relaxed $\ell$-Minimal Gradient Descent methods for quadratic optimization; the family includes the omnipresent Steepest Descent method, as well as the Minimal Gradient method.…
In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…
Projected subgradient descent (PSD) has gained popularity for solving robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) because it applies to a broader class of uncertainty sets than traditional dynamic programming. Existing work claims that RMDPs…
Prior work on differential privacy analysis of randomized SGD algorithms relies on composition theorems, where the implicit (unrealistic) assumption is that the internal state of the iterative algorithm is revealed to the adversary. As a…
We study the global convergence of policy gradient for infinite-horizon entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces. We consider log-linear softmax policies with linear function…
We propose a new technique that boosts the convergence of training generative adversarial networks. Generally, the rate of training deep models reduces severely after multiple iterations. A key reason for this phenomenon is that a deep…
We study stochastic convex optimization (SCO) with heavy-tailed gradients under pure $\varepsilon$-differential privacy (DP). Instead of assuming a bound on the worst-case Lipschitz parameter of the loss, we assume only a bounded $k$-th…
We study online finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes with adversarially changing loss and aggregate bandit feedback (a.k.a full-bandit). Under this type of feedback, the agent observes only the total loss incurred over the entire…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental algorithm in machine learning, representing the optimization backbone for training several classic models, from regression to neural networks. Given the recent practical focus on…
Last-iterate convergence of learning dynamics in games has attracted significant recent attention. In two-player zero-sum games with bandit feedback, where only the loss of the selected action pair is observed, Fiegel et al. (2025) show a…
This paper shows that the implicit bias of gradient descent on linearly separable data is exactly characterized by the optimal solution of a dual optimization problem given by a smoothed margin, even for general losses. This is in contrast…
Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…
This paper presents a constrained policy gradient algorithm. We introduce constraints for safe learning with the following steps. First, learning is slowed down (lazy learning) so that the episodic policy change can be computed with the…
The non-asymptotic analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically yields bounds that decompose into a bias term and a variance term. In this work, we focus on the bias component and study the extent to which SGD can match the…
Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) methods for min-max optimization problems typically produce oscillatory behavior that can lead to instability, e.g., in bilinear settings. To address this problem, we introduce a dissipation term into the GDA…
A rich body of prior work has highlighted the existence of communication bottlenecks in synchronous data-parallel training. To alleviate these bottlenecks, a long line of recent work proposes gradient and model compression methods. In this…
$L_0$-smoothness, which has been pivotal to advancing decentralized optimization theory, is often fairly restrictive for modern tasks like deep learning. The recent advent of relaxed $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness condition enables improved…
In this paper, we consider continuous-time stochastic optimal control problems where the cost is evaluated through a coherent risk measure. We provide an explicit gradient descent-ascent algorithm which applies to problems subject to…