Paper tackles efficient evaluation of natural stochastic policies in offline RL.
arXiv research
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Improves understanding of stochastic NGVI convergence rates.
Paper discusses new stochastic algorithms for sparse signal recovery.
Paper introduces a new volatility model for natural gas markets and discusses swing option pricing.
The multinomial logistic regression (MLR) model is widely used in statistics and machine learning. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the most common approach for determining the parameters of a MLR model in big data scenarios. However, SGD has slow sub-linear rates of convergence. A way to improve these rates of con…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value gradients is desirable as policy improvement occurs along the direction of stee…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional stochastic optimization methods, SVI takes precautions to use unbiased stochastic g…
How to model distribution of sequential data, including but not limited to speech and human motions, is an important ongoing research problem. It has been demonstrated that model capacity can be significantly enhanced by introducing stochastic latent variables in the hidden states of recurrent neural networks. Simultan…
We consider three different approaches to define natural Riemannian metrics on polytopes of stochastic matrices. First, we define a natural class of stochastic maps between these polytopes and give a metric characterization of Chentsov type in terms of invariance with respect to these maps. Second, we consider the Fish…
New convergence results for NGVI with various step sizes and sample sizes.
Novel framework for learning infinitesimal generator of stochastic processes.
The paper studies efficient Hessian fitting methods for stochastic optimization.
Natural gradient descent is an optimization method traditionally motivated from the perspective of information geometry, and works well for many applications as an alternative to stochastic gradient descent. In this paper we critically analyze this method and its properties, and show how it can be viewed as a type of 2…
The goal of this paper is to clarify when a semilinear stochastic partial differential equation driven by Lévy processes admits an affine realization. Our results are accompanied by several examples arising in natural sciences and economics.
Closed-form flow matching yields similar performance to stochastic version, improving model performance.
The study examines convergence of stochastic processes on large graphs and adjacency matrices.
Learning the distribution of natural images is one of the hardest and most important problems in machine learning. The problem remains open, because the enormous complexity of the structures in natural images spans all length scales. We break down the complexity of the problem and show that the hierarchy of structures …
In this article we present an intrinsec construction of foliated Brownian motion via stochastic calculus adapted to foliation. The stochastic approach together with a proposed foliated vector calculus provide a natural method to work on harmonic measures. Other results include a decomposition of the Laplacian in terms …
Algorithm learns which weights to share in deep multi-task learning.
In a noncommutative torus, effect of perturbation by inner derivation on the associated quantum stochastic process and geometric parameters like volume and scalar curvature have been studied. Cohomological calculations show that the above perturbation produces new spectral triples. Also for the Weyl C^*-algebra, the La…
The paper examines conditions for stochastic invariance of cones in SPDEs with jumps.
Natural language processing often involves computations with semantic or syntactic graphs to facilitate sophisticated reasoning based on structural relationships. While convolution kernels provide a powerful tool for comparing graph structure based on node (word) level relationships, they are difficult to customize and…
Recent work has argued that stochastic gradient descent can approximate the Bayesian uncertainty in model parameters near local minima. In this work we develop a similar correspondence for minibatch natural gradient descent (NGD). We prove that for sufficiently small learning rates, if the model predictions on the trai…
Stochastic gradient methods enable learning probabilistic models from large amounts of data. While large step-sizes (learning rates) have shown to be best for least-squares (e.g., Gaussian noise) once combined with parameter averaging, these are not leading to convergent algorithms in general. In this paper, we conside…
Black box discrete optimization (BBDO) appears in wide range of engineering tasks. Evolutionary or other BBDO approaches have been applied, aiming at automating necessary tuning of system parameters, such as hyper parameter tuning of machine learning based systems when being installed for a specific task. However, auto…
Unified approach to fair online learning with stochastic contexts.
A method for diffusion on probability simplex for generative models.
New learnability criteria for non-iid processes equivalent to online learning.
Stochastic defense improves natural classifiers against adversarial attacks.
Quantum calculus models stock liquidity issues.
We propose a novel reformulation of the stochastic optimal control problem as an approximate inference problem, demonstrating, that such a interpretation leads to new practical methods for the original problem. In particular we characterise a novel class of iterative solutions to the stochastic optimal control problem …
The generalized 5D Black-Scholes differential equation with stochastic volatility is derived. The projections of the stochastic evolutions associated with the random variables from an enlarged space or superspace onto an ordinary space can be achieved via higher-dimensional operators. The stochastic nature of the secur…
This essay discusses the advantages of a probabilistic agent-based approach to questions in theoretical economics, from the nature of economic agents, to the nature of the equilibria supported by their interactions. One idea we propose is that "agents" are meta-individual, hierarchically structured objects, that includ…
We consider the problem of minimizing the regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit, when the measure of goodness of an arm is not the mean return, but some general function of the mean and the variance.We characterize the conditions under which learning is possible and present examples for which no natural algorithm can…
SGLRW improves robustness of stochastic gradient MCMC methods.
We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation and the hierarchical Dirichlet process topic model. Usin…
We present practical Levenberg-Marquardt variants of Gauss-Newton and natural gradient methods for solving non-convex optimization problems that arise in training deep neural networks involving enormous numbers of variables and huge data sets. Our methods use subsampled Gauss-Newton or Fisher information matrices and e…
The natural gradient method has been used effectively in conjugate Gaussian process models, but the non-conjugate case has been largely unexplored. We examine how natural gradients can be used in non-conjugate stochastic settings, together with hyperparameter learning. We conclude that the natural gradient can signific…
This work learns effective dynamics from short-term data of stochastic systems.
Motivated by the task of hyperparameter optimization, we introduce the non-stochastic best-arm identification problem. Within the multi-armed bandit literature, the cumulative regret objective enjoys algorithms and analyses for both the non-stochastic and stochastic settings while to the best of our knowledge, the best…
A new deep generative model uses BSDEs for high-dimensional data generation.
A new algorithm estimates VaR and ES for financial risks.
The paper analyzes error propagation in dynamic programming for stochastic control and option pricing.
Paper corrects and expands stochastic Lie systems theory.
High sensitivity of neural architecture search (NAS) methods against their input such as step-size (i.e., learning rate) and search space prevents practitioners from applying them out-of-the-box to their own problems, albeit its purpose is to automate a part of tuning process. Aiming at a fast, robust, and widely-appli…
We provide a numerically robust and fast method capable of exploiting the local geometry when solving large-scale stochastic optimisation problems. Our key innovation is an auxiliary variable construction coupled with an inverse Hessian approximation computed using a receding history of iterates and gradients. It is th…
Paper proposes a reinforcement learning framework for efficient hyper-parameter tuning of stochastic optimization algorithms.
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. More precisely, we interpret a large class of stochastic optimization methods as procedures that iteratively minimize a surrogate of th…