A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
The learning rate warmup heuristic achieves remarkable success in stabilizing training, accelerating convergence and improving generalization for adaptive stochastic optimization algorithms like RMSprop and Adam. Here, we study its mechanism in details. Pursuing the theory behind warmup, we identify a problem of the ad…
We propose algorithms for online principal component analysis (PCA) and variance minimization for adaptive settings. Previous literature has focused on upper bounding the static adversarial regret, whose comparator is the optimal fixed action in hindsight. However, static regret is not an appropriate metric when the un…
Adaptive importance sampling for stochastic optimization is a promising approach that offers improved convergence through variance reduction. In this work, we propose a new framework for variance reduction that enables the use of mixtures over predefined sampling distributions, which can naturally encode prior knowledg…
Sequence generation models are commonly refined with reinforcement learning over user-defined metrics. However, high gradient variance hinders the practical use of this method. To stabilize this method, we adapt to contextual generation of categorical sequences a policy gradient estimator, which evaluates a set of corr…
Variance-reduced algorithms, although achieve great theoretical performance, can run slowly in practice due to the periodic gradient estimation with a large batch of data. Batch-size adaptation thus arises as a promising approach to accelerate such algorithms. However, existing schemes either apply prescribed batch-siz…
AdaGrad-Norm achieves optimal convergence rates for non-convex objectives without tuning.
problem Optimal convergence rates for non-convex, smooth objectives with adaptive step sizes.
method Adaptive SGD (AdaGrad-Norm) with self-tuning step sizes, analyzing under unbounded gradients and affine variance scaling.
result AdaGrad-Norm achieves order optimal convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{\mathrm{poly}\log(T)}{\sqrt{T}}
ight)$ under optimal assumptions.
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple empirical inspection. The batch size significantly influences the behavior of the …
New algorithms reduce regret in online MDPs by adapting to data and variance.
problem Adapting to both adversarial and stochastic environments in online MDPs.
method Develops algorithms based on global optimization and policy optimization, using optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader with log-barrier regularization.
result Achieves refined data-dependent and variance-dependent regret bounds.
Portfolio allocation is crucial for investment companies. However, getting the best strategy in a complex and dynamic stock market is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Deep Deterministic Reinforcement Learning scheme (Adaptive DDPG) for the portfolio allocation task, which incorporates optimistic …
The paper analyzes sparse high-dimensional linear regression with random design and unknown error variance, providing adaptiveness and concentration rates.
problem Sparse high-dimensional linear regression with random design and unknown error variance.
method Analysis of posterior concentration rates, employing techniques to address model misspecification.
result Adaptiveness and concentration rates of the posterior for sparse high-dimensional linear regression.
We consider the problem of streaming kernel regression, when the observations arrive sequentially and the goal is to recover the underlying mean function, assumed to belong to an RKHS. The variance of the noise is not assumed to be known. In this context, we tackle the problem of tuning the regularization parameter ada…
The estimation of normalizing constants is a fundamental step in probabilistic model comparison. Sequential Monte Carlo methods may be used for this task and have the advantage of being inherently parallelizable. However, the standard choice of using a fixed number of particles at each iteration is suboptimal because s…
Estimators computed from adaptively collected data do not behave like their non-adaptive brethren. Rather, the sequential dependence of the collection policy can lead to severe distributional biases that persist even in the infinite data limit. We develop a general method -- W-decorrelation -- for transformi…
We introduce Kalman Gradient Descent, a stochastic optimization algorithm that uses Kalman filtering to adaptively reduce gradient variance in stochastic gradient descent by filtering the gradient estimates. We present both a theoretical analysis of convergence in a non-convex setting and experimental results which dem…
Policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in challenging learning tasks such as continuous control, but suffer from high sample complexity. Experience replay is a commonly used approach to improve sample efficiency, but gradient estimators using past trajectories typica…