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.
Before training a neural net, a classic rule of thumb is to randomly initialize the weights so the variance of activations is preserved across layers. This is traditionally interpreted using the total variance due to randomness in both weights \emph{and} samples. Alternatively, one can interpret the rule of thumb as pr…
Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds. Focusing on problems arising in continuous control, we propose a functional regularization appr…
Variance reduction (VR) methods boost the performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by enabling the use of larger, constant stepsizes and preserving linear convergence rates. However, current variance reduced SGD methods require either high memory usage or an exact gradient computation (using the entire dataset)…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods have proven to be very successful in supervised learning. However, their adaptation…
We show that stochastic recovery always leads to counter-intuitive behaviors in the risk measures of a CDO tranche - namely, continuity on default and positive credit spread risk cannot be ensured simultaneously. We then propose a simple recovery variance regularization method to control the magnitude of negative credi…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently received considerable attention due to its applicability to a wide range of real-world applications. However, achieving efficient communication among agents has always been an overarching problem in MARL. In this work, we propose Variance Based Control (VBC), a sim…
Paper bridges statistical inference for DP-SGD, a privacy-preserving machine learning method.
problem Asymptotic statistical inference for Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD).
method Established asymptotic properties of SGD under randomized subsampling, extended to DP-SGD, proposed methods for constructing valid confidence intervals.
result Valid confidence intervals for DP-SGD output achieve nominal coverage rates while maintaining privacy.
Deep neural networks suffer from over-fitting and catastrophic forgetting when trained with small data. One natural remedy for this problem is data augmentation, which has been recently shown to be effective. However, previous works either assume that intra-class variances can always be generalized to new classes, or e…
FlowSDR learns a low-dimensional projection preserving the response's conditional distribution.
problem Learning a low-dimensional projection that captures the response's conditional distribution.
method FlowSDR uses conditional log-likelihood maximization with monotone rational-quadratic spline flows to learn the projection and conditional density.
result FlowSDR outperforms existing SDR methods in various simulation settings and a face-age prediction task.
In this paper we want to exploit further the semi-discrete method appeared in Halidias and Stamatiou (2015). We are interested in the numerical solution of mean reverting CEV processes that appear in financial mathematics models and are described as non negative solutions of certain stochastic differential equations wi…
New estimator improves off-policy evaluation for large action spaces.
problem Conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance in off-policy evaluation for large discrete action spaces.
method Proposes OffCEM estimator based on conjunct effect model (CEM), applying importance weighting only to action clusters and using model-based reward estimation for residual effects.
result Proposed estimator is unbiased under local correctness condition, providing substantial improvements in OPE especially with many actions.
It has often been stated that, within the class of continuous stochastic volatility models calibrated to vanillas, the price of a VIX future is maximized by the Dupire local volatility model. In this article we prove that this statement is incorrect: we build a continuous stochastic volatility model in which a VIX futu…