In this work, we study stochastic non-cooperative games, where only noisy black-box function evaluations are available to estimate the cost function for each player. Since each player's cost function depends on both its own decision variables and its rivals' decision variables, local information needs to be exchanged through a center/network in most existing work for seeking the Nash equilibrium. We propose a new stochastic distributed learning algorithm that does not require communications among players. The proposed algorithm uses simultaneous perturbation method to estimate the gradient of each cost function, and uses mirror descent method to search for the Nash equilibrium. We provide asymptotic analysis for the bias and variance of gradient estimates, and show the proposed algorithm converges to the Nash equilibrium in mean square for the class of strictly monotone games at a rate faster than the existing algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed method is buttressed in a numerical experiment.
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying Markov random processes parameterized by the underlying optimization variable. These time-varying samples make gradient directions in our update biased and dependent, which can potentially lead to the divergence of the iterates. In our two-time-scale approach, one scale is to estimate the true gradient from these samples, which is then used to update the estimate of the optimal solution. While these two iterates are implemented simultaneously, the former is updated "faster" (using bigger step sizes) than the latter (using smaller step sizes). Our first contribution is to characterize the finite-time complexity of the proposed two-time-scale stochastic gradient method. In particular, we provide explicit formulas for the convergence rates of this method under different structural assumptions, namely, strong convexity, convexity, the Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition, and general non-convexity. We apply our framework to two problems in control and reinforcement learning. First, we look at the standard online actor-critic algorithm over finite state and action spaces and derive a convergence rate of O(k^(-2/5)), which recovers the best known rate derived specifically for this problem. Second, we study an online actor-critic algorithm for the linear-quadratic regulator and show that a convergence rate of O(k^(-2/3)) is achieved. This is the first time such a result is known in the literature. Finally, we support our theoretical analysis with numerical simulations where the convergence rates are visualized.
We consider minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function using a stochastic Newton method. At each iteration, the algorithm is given an oracle access to a stochastic estimate of the Hessian matrix. The oracle model includes popular algorithms such as the Subsampled Newton and Newton Sketch, which can efficiently construct stochastic Hessian estimates for many tasks. Despite using second-order information, these existing methods do not exhibit superlinear convergence, unless the stochastic noise is gradually reduced to zero during the iteration, which would lead to a computational blow-up in the per-iteration cost. We address this limitation with Hessian averaging: instead of using the most recent Hessian estimate, our algorithm maintains an average of all past estimates. This reduces the stochastic noise while avoiding the computational blow-up. We show that this scheme enjoys local $Q$-superlinear convergence with a non-asymptotic rate of $(\Upsilon\sqrt{\log (t)/t}\,)^{t}$, where $\Upsilon$ is proportional to the level of stochastic noise in the Hessian oracle. A potential drawback of this (uniform averaging) approach is that the averaged estimates contain Hessian information from the global phase of the iteration, i.e., before the iterates converge to a local neighborhood. This leads to a distortion that may substantially delay the superlinear convergence until long after the local neighborhood is reached. To address this drawback, we study a number of weighted averaging schemes that assign larger weights to recent Hessians, so that the superlinear convergence arises sooner, albeit with a slightly slower rate. Remarkably, we show that there exists a universal weighted averaging scheme that transitions to local convergence at an optimal stage, and still enjoys a superlinear convergence~rate nearly (up to a logarithmic factor) matching that of uniform Hessian averaging.
Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), in which agents learn to make a sequence of decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system, that is, they act under partial observability of the states, are ubiquitous. Partially observable RL can be notoriously difficult -- well-known information-theoretic results show that learning partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) requires an exponential number of samples in the worst case. Yet, this does not rule out the existence of large subclasses of POMDPs over which learning is tractable. In this paper we identify such a subclass, which we call weakly revealing POMDPs. This family rules out the pathological instances of POMDPs where observations are uninformative to a degree that makes learning hard. We prove that for weakly revealing POMDPs, a simple algorithm combining optimism and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is sufficient to guarantee polynomial sample complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably sample-efficient result for learning from interactions in overcomplete POMDPs, where the number of latent states can be larger than the number of observations.
Bayesian policy reuse (BPR) is a general policy transfer framework for selecting a source policy from an offline library by inferring the task belief based on some observation signals and a trained observation model. In this paper, we propose an improved BPR method to achieve more efficient policy transfer in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, most BPR algorithms use the episodic return as the observation signal that contains limited information and cannot be obtained until the end of an episode. Instead, we employ the state transition sample, which is informative and instantaneous, as the observation signal for faster and more accurate task inference. Second, BPR algorithms usually require numerous samples to estimate the probability distribution of the tabular-based observation model, which may be expensive and even infeasible to learn and maintain, especially when using the state transition sample as the signal. Hence, we propose a scalable observation model based on fitting state transition functions of source tasks from only a small number of samples, which can generalize to any signals observed in the target task. Moreover, we extend the offline-mode BPR to the continual learning setting by expanding the scalable observation model in a plug-and-play fashion, which can avoid negative transfer when faced with new unknown tasks. Experimental results show that our method can consistently facilitate faster and more efficient policy transfer.
This paper focuses on stochastic saddle point problems with decision-dependent distributions. These are problems whose objective is the expected value of a stochastic payoff function, where random variables are drawn from a distribution induced by a distributional map. For general distributional maps, the problem of finding saddle points is in general computationally burdensome, even if the distribution is known. To enable a tractable solution approach, we introduce the notion of equilibrium points -- which are saddle points for the stationary stochastic minimax problem that they induce -- and provide conditions for their existence and uniqueness. We demonstrate that the distance between the two solution types is bounded provided that the objective has a strongly-convex-strongly-concave payoff and a Lipschitz continuous distributional map. We develop deterministic and stochastic primal-dual algorithms and demonstrate their convergence to the equilibrium point. In particular, by modeling errors emerging from a stochastic gradient estimator as sub-Weibull random variables, we provide error bounds in expectation and in high probability that hold for each iteration. Moreover, we show convergence to a neighborhood almost surely. Finally, we investigate a condition on the distributional map -- which we call opposing mixture dominance -- that ensures that the objective is strongly-convex-strongly-concave. We tailor the convergence results for the primal-dual algorithms to this opposing mixture dominance setup.
We study the decentralized consensus and stochastic optimization problems with compressed communications over static directed graphs. We propose an iterative gradient-based algorithm that compresses messages according to a desired compression ratio. The proposed method provably reduces the communication overhead on the network at every communication round. Contrary to existing literature, we allow for arbitrary compression ratios in the communicated messages. We show a linear convergence rate for the proposed method on the consensus problem. Moreover, we provide explicit convergence rates for decentralized stochastic optimization problems on smooth functions that are either (i) strongly convex, (ii) convex, or (iii) non-convex. Finally, we provide numerical experiments to illustrate convergence under arbitrary compression ratios and the communication efficiency of our algorithm.
Stochastic optimization algorithms implemented on distributed computing architectures are increasingly used to tackle large-scale machine learning applications. A key bottleneck in such distributed systems is the communication overhead for exchanging information such as stochastic gradients between different workers. Sparse communication with memory and the adaptive aggregation methodology are two successful frameworks among the various techniques proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we exploit the advantages of Sparse communication and Adaptive aggregated Stochastic Gradients to design a communication-efficient distributed algorithm named SASG. Specifically, we determine the workers who need to communicate with the parameter server based on the adaptive aggregation rule and then sparsify the transmitted information. Therefore, our algorithm reduces both the overhead of communication rounds and the number of communication bits in the distributed system. We define an auxiliary sequence and provide convergence results of the algorithm with the help of Lyapunov function analysis. Experiments on training deep neural networks show that our algorithm can significantly reduce the communication overhead compared to the previous methods, with little impact on training and testing accuracy.
The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have nowadays gained particular attention. In this paper, we study two variants of this kind, namely, the Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Langevin Dynamics and the Stochastic Recursive Gradient Langevin Dynamics. We prove their convergence to the objective distribution in terms of KL-divergence under the sole assumptions of smoothness and Log-Sobolev inequality which are weaker conditions than those used in prior works for these algorithms. With the batch size and the inner loop length set to $\sqrt{n}$, the gradient complexity to achieve an $\epsilon$-precision is $\tilde{O}((n+dn^{1/2}\epsilon^{-1})\gamma^2 L^2\alpha^{-2})$, which is an improvement from any previous analyses. We also show some essential applications of our result to non-convex optimization.
Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss functions are usually non-smooth. More recently, computationally fast non-convex approaches via sub-gradient descent are proposed, which, unfortunately, fail to deliver a statistically consistent estimator even under sub-Gaussian noise. In this paper, we introduce a novel Riemannian sub-gradient (RsGrad) algorithm which is not only computationally efficient with linear convergence but also is statistically optimal, be the noise Gaussian or heavy-tailed. Convergence theory is established for a general framework and specific applications to absolute loss, Huber loss, and quantile loss are investigated. Compared with existing non-convex methods, ours reveals a surprising phenomenon of dual-phase convergence. In phase one, RsGrad behaves as in a typical non-smooth optimization that requires gradually decaying stepsizes. However, phase one only delivers a statistically sub-optimal estimator which is already observed in the existing literature. Interestingly, during phase two, RsGrad converges linearly as if minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function and thus a constant stepsize suffices. Underlying the phase-two convergence is the smoothing effect of random noise to the non-smooth robust losses in an area close but not too close to the truth. Lastly, RsGrad is applicable for low-rank tensor estimation under heavy-tailed noise where a statistically optimal rate is attainable with the same phenomenon of dual-phase convergence, and a novel shrinkage-based second-order moment method is guaranteed to deliver a warm initialization. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical discovery and showcase the superiority of RsGrad over prior methods.
Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.