Dongruo Zhou

Stochastic Nested Variance Reduction for Nonconvex Optimization

2018 · arXiv (Cornell University)

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with conventional stochastic variance …

Nearly Minimax Optimal Regret for Learning Infinite-horizon Average-reward MDPs with Linear Function Approximation

2021 · arXiv (Cornell University)

We study reinforcement learning in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation, where the transition probability function of the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP) admits a linear form over a feature mapping of the …

Iterative Teacher-Aware Learning

2021 · arXiv (Cornell University)

In human pedagogy, teachers and students can interact adaptively to maximize communication efficiency. The teacher adjusts her teaching method for different students, and the student, after getting familiar with the teacher's instruction mechanism, can infer …