Related papers: Bilevel Optimization over Saddle Points of Zero-Su…
This paper focuses on the decentralized optimization (minimization and saddle point) problems with objective functions that satisfy Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition (PL-condition). The first part of the paper is devoted to the minimization…
In e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and TaoBao, ranking items in a search session is a typical multi-step decision-making problem. Learning to rank (LTR) methods have been widely applied to ranking problems. However, such methods often…
We study the alternating gradient descent-ascent (AltGDA) algorithm in two-player zero-sum games. Alternating methods, where players take turns to update their strategies, have long been recognized as simple and practical approaches for…
We study the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) with an average-reward criterion. The goal is to recover an unknown policy and a reward function when the agent only has samples of states and actions from an experienced agent.…
Bilevel optimization has found extensive applications in modern machine learning problems such as hyperparameter optimization, neural architecture search, meta-learning, etc. While bilevel problems with a unique inner minimal point (e.g.,…
In reinforcement learning (RL), rewards of states are typically considered additive, and following the Markov assumption, they are $\textit{independent}$ of states visited previously. In many important applications, such as coverage…
Reinforcement learning from self-play has recently reported many successes. Self-play, where the agents compete with themselves, is often used to generate training data for iterative policy improvement. In previous work, heuristic rules are…
Learning in multi-player games can model a large variety of practical scenarios, where each player seeks to optimize its own local objective function, which at the same time relies on the actions taken by others. Motivated by the frequent…
Minimax optimization recently is widely applied in many machine learning tasks such as generative adversarial networks, robust learning and reinforcement learning. In the paper, we study a class of nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization…
In this work, we study first-order algorithms for solving Bilevel Optimization (BO) where the objective functions are smooth but possibly nonconvex in both levels and the variables are restricted to closed convex sets. As a first step, we…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
Reinforcement-based learning has attracted considerable attention both in modeling human behavior as well as in engineering, for designing measurement- or payoff-based optimization schemes. Such learning schemes exhibit several advantages,…
In this work, we study the problem of finding Pareto optimal policies in multi-agent reinforcement learning problems with cooperative reward structures. We show that any algorithm where each agent only optimizes their reward is subject to…
In recent years, a variety of gradient-based first-order methods have been developed to solve bi-level optimization problems for learning applications. However, theoretical guarantees of these existing approaches heavily rely on the…
In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…
Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…
Bilevel programming has recently received attention in the literature due to its wide range of applications, including reinforcement learning and hyper-parameter optimization. However, it is widely assumed that the underlying bilevel…
Bilevel optimization (BO) has recently gained prominence in many machine learning applications due to its ability to capture the nested structure inherent in these problems. Recently, many hypergradient methods have been proposed as…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
Min-max saddle point games appear in a wide range of applications in machine leaning and signal processing. Despite their wide applicability, theoretical studies are mostly limited to the special convex-concave structure. While some recent…