Reward-Weighted Regression (RWR) belongs to a family of widely known iterative Reinforcement Learning algorithms based on the Expectation-Maximization framework. In this family, learning at each iteration consists of sampling a batch of trajectories using the current policy and fitting a new policy to maximize a return-weighted log-likelihood of actions. Although RWR is known to yield monotonic improvement of the policy under certain circumstances, whether and under which conditions RWR converges to the optimal policy have remained open questions. In this paper, we provide for the first time a proof that RWR converges to a global optimum when no function approximation is used, in a general compact setting. Furthermore, for the simpler case with finite state and action spaces we prove R-linear convergence of the state-value function to the optimum.
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The phase retrieval problem is concerned with recovering an unknown signal $\bf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^n$ from a set of magnitude-only measurements $y_j=|\langle \bf{a}_j,\bf{x} \rangle|, \; j=1,\ldots,m$. A natural least squares formulation can be used to solve this problem efficiently even with random initialization, despite its non-convexity of the loss function. One way to explain this surprising phenomenon is the benign geometric landscape: (1) all local minimizers are global; and (2) the objective function has a negative curvature around each saddle point and local maximizer. In this paper, we show that $m=O(n \log n)$ Gaussian random measurements are sufficient to guarantee the loss function of a commonly used estimator has such benign geometric landscape with high probability. This is a step toward answering the open problem given by Sun-Qu-Wright, in which the authors suggest that $O(n \log n)$ or even $O(n)$ is enough to guarantee the favorable geometric property.
Escaping from saddle points and finding local minimum is a central problem in nonconvex optimization. Perturbed gradient methods are perhaps the simplest approach for this problem. However, to find $(\epsilon, \sqrt{\epsilon})$-approximate local minima, the existing best stochastic gradient complexity for this type of algorithms is $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3.5})$, which is not optimal. In this paper, we propose LENA (Last stEp shriNkAge), a faster perturbed stochastic gradient framework for finding local minima. We show that LENA with stochastic gradient estimators such as SARAH/SPIDER and STORM can find $(\epsilon, \epsilon_{H})$-approximate local minima within $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3} + \epsilon_{H}^{-6})$ stochastic gradient evaluations (or $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3})$ when $\epsilon_H = \sqrt{\epsilon}$). The core idea of our framework is a step-size shrinkage scheme to control the average movement of the iterates, which leads to faster convergence to the local minima.
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, the $k$-center problem is to find $k$ congruent disks of minimum possible radius such that their union covers all the points in $P$. The $2$-center problem is a special case of the $k$-center problem that has been extensively studied in the recent past \cite{CAHN,HT,SH}. In this paper, we consider a generalized version of the $2$-center problem called \textit{proximity connected} $2$-center (PCTC) problem. In this problem, we are also given a parameter $\delta\geq 0$ and we have the additional constraint that the distance between the centers of the disks should be at most $\delta$. Note that when $\delta=0$, the PCTC problem is reduced to the $1$-center(minimum enclosing disk) problem and when $\delta$ tends to infinity, it is reduced to the $2$-center problem. The PCTC problem first appeared in the context of wireless networks in 1992 \cite{ACN0}, but obtaining a nontrivial deterministic algorithm for the problem remained open. In this paper, we resolve this open problem by providing a deterministic $O(n^2\log n)$ time algorithm for the problem.
This tutorial aims to provide an intuitive understanding of the Gaussian processes regression. Gaussian processes regression (GPR) models have been widely used in machine learning applications because of their representation flexibility and inherent uncertainty measures over predictions. The basic concepts that a Gaussian process is built on, including multivariate normal distribution, kernels, non-parametric models, and joint and conditional probability were explained first. Next, the GPR was described concisely together with an implementation of a standard GPR algorithm. Beyond the standard GPR, packages to implement state-of-the-art Gaussian processes algorithms were reviewed. This tutorial was written in an accessible way to make sure readers without a machine learning background can obtain a good understanding of the GPR basics.
We investigate the feature compression of high-dimensional ridge regression using the optimal subsampling technique. Specifically, based on the basic framework of random sampling algorithm on feature for ridge regression and the A-optimal design criterion, we first obtain a set of optimal subsampling probabilities. Considering that the obtained probabilities are uneconomical, we then propose the nearly optimal ones. With these probabilities, a two step iterative algorithm is established which has lower computational cost and higher accuracy. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical experiments to support the proposed methods. Numerical results demonstrate the decent performance of our methods.
We consider smooth optimization problems with a Hermitian positive semi-definite fixed-rank constraint, where a quotient geometry with three Riemannian metrics $g^i(\cdot, \cdot)$ $(i=1,2,3)$ is used to represent this constraint. By taking the nonlinear conjugate gradient method (CG) as an example, we show that CG on the quotient geometry with metric $g^1$ is equivalent to CG on the factor-based optimization framework, which is often called the Burer--Monteiro approach. We also show that CG on the quotient geometry with metric $g^3$ is equivalent to CG on the commonly-used embedded geometry. We call two CG methods equivalent if they produce an identical sequence of iterates $\{X_k\}$. In addition, we show that if the limit point of the sequence $\{X_k\}$ generated by an algorithm has lower rank, that is $X_k\in \mathbb C^{n\times n}, k = 1, 2, \ldots$ has rank $p$ and the limit point $X_*$ has rank $r < p$, then the condition number of the Riemannian Hessian with metric $g^1$ can be unbounded, but those of the other two metrics stay bounded. Numerical experiments show that the Burer--Monteiro CG method has slower local convergence rate if the limit point has a reduced rank, compared to CG on the quotient geometry under the other two metrics. This slower convergence rate can thus be attributed to the large condition number of the Hessian near a minimizer.
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.
We study the acceleration of the Local Polynomial Interpolation-based Gradient Descent method (LPI-GD) recently proposed for the approximate solution of empirical risk minimization problems (ERM). We focus on loss functions that are strongly convex and smooth with condition number $\sigma$. We additionally assume the loss function is $\eta$-H\"older continuous with respect to the data. The oracle complexity of LPI-GD is $\tilde{O}\left(\sigma m^d \log(1/\varepsilon)\right)$ for a desired accuracy $\varepsilon$, where $d$ is the dimension of the parameter space, and $m$ is the cardinality of an approximation grid. The factor $m^d$ can be shown to scale as $O((1/\varepsilon)^{d/2\eta})$. LPI-GD has been shown to have better oracle complexity than gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for certain parameter regimes. We propose two accelerated methods for the ERM problem based on LPI-GD and show an oracle complexity of $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\sigma} m^d \log(1/\varepsilon)\right)$. Moreover, we provide the first empirical study on local polynomial interpolation-based gradient methods and corroborate that LPI-GD has better performance than GD and SGD in some scenarios, and the proposed methods achieve acceleration.
In this paper we study the finite sample and asymptotic properties of various weighting estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE), several of which are based on Abadie (2003)'s kappa theorem. Our framework presumes a binary endogenous explanatory variable ("treatment") and a binary instrumental variable, which may only be valid after conditioning on additional covariates. We argue that one of the Abadie estimators, which we show is weight normalized, is likely to dominate the others in many contexts. A notable exception is in settings with one-sided noncompliance, where certain unnormalized estimators have the advantage of being based on a denominator that is bounded away from zero. We use a simulation study and three empirical applications to illustrate our findings. In applications to causal effects of college education using the college proximity instrument (Card, 1995) and causal effects of childbearing using the sibling sex composition instrument (Angrist and Evans, 1998), the unnormalized estimates are clearly unreasonable, with "incorrect" signs, magnitudes, or both. Overall, our results suggest that (i) the relative performance of different kappa weighting estimators varies with features of the data-generating process; and that (ii) the normalized version of Tan (2006)'s estimator may be an attractive alternative in many contexts. Applied researchers with access to a binary instrumental variable should also consider covariate balancing or doubly robust estimators of the LATE.
The minimum energy path (MEP) describes the mechanism of reaction, and the energy barrier along the path can be used to calculate the reaction rate in thermal systems. The nudged elastic band (NEB) method is one of the most commonly used schemes to compute MEPs numerically. It approximates an MEP by a discrete set of configuration images, where the discretization size determines both computational cost and accuracy of the simulations. In this paper, we consider a discrete MEP to be a stationary state of the NEB method and prove an optimal convergence rate of the discrete MEP with respect to the number of images. Numerical simulations for the transitions of some several proto-typical model systems are performed to support the theory.
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