Abstract In recent years, attention has been focused on the relationship between black-box optimization problem and reinforcement learning problem. In this research, we propose the Mirror Descent Search (MDS) algorithm which is applicable both for black box optimization problems and reinforcement learning problems. Our method is based on the mirror descent method, which is a general optimization algorithm. The contribution of this research is roughly twofold. We propose two essential algorithms, called MDS and Accelerated Mirror Descent Search (AMDS), and two more approximate algorithms: Gaussian Mirror Descent Search (G-MDS) and Gaussian Accelerated Mirror Descent Search (G-AMDS). This research shows that the advanced methods developed in the context of the mirror descent research can be applied to reinforcement learning problem. We also clarify the relationship between an existing reinforcement learning algorithm and our method. With two evaluation experiments, we show our proposed algorithms converge faster than some state-of-the-art methods.
The KL divergence between @math and @math is represented as follows. We call @math Kullback Leibler divergence under the condition that we determine @math by reference to the fixed @math ; we call @math reverse-KL divergence @cite_9 . Bregman divergence includes both of KL and RKL divergence @cite_33 , so we expect it provides an unified formulation of above-mentioned algorithms.
@cite_9 @cite_33
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We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of functional gradient descent that minimizes the KL divergence. Empirical studies are performed on various real world models and datasets, on which our method is competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods. The derivation of our method is based on a new theoretical result that connects the derivative of KL divergence under smooth transforms with Stein’s identity and a recently proposed kernelized Stein discrepancy, which is of independent interest. © 2018 by authors.All right reserved. Dropout, a stochastic regularisation technique for training of neural networks, has recently been reinterpreted as a specific type of approximate inference algorithm for Bayesian neural networks. The main contribution of the reinterpretation is in providing a theoretical framework useful for analysing and extending the algorithm. We show that the proposed framework suffers from several issues; from undefined or pathological behaviour of the true posterior related to use of improper priors, to an ill-defined variational objective due to singularity of the approximating distribution relative to the true posterior. Our analysis of the improper log uniform prior used in variational Gaussian dropout suggests the pathologies are generally irredeemable, and that the algorithm still works only because the variational formulation annuls some of the pathologies. To address the singularity issue, we proffer Quasi-KL (QKL) divergence, a new approximate inference objective for approximation of high-dimensional distributions. We show that motivations for variational Bernoulli dropout based on discretisation and noise have QKL as a limit. Properties of QKL are studied both theoretically and on a simple practical example which shows that the QKL-optimal approximation of a full rank Gaussian with a degenerate one naturally leads to the Principal Component Analysis solution. We consider the problem of projecting a vector onto the simplex Δ = x ∈ ℝ+d : Σi=1d xi = 1 , using a Bregman projection. This is a common problem in first-order methods for convex optimization and online-learning algorithms, such as mirror descent. We derive the KKT conditions of the projection problem, and show that for Bregman divergences induced by ω-potentials, one can efficiently compute the solution using a bisection method. More precisely, an ω-approximate projection can be obtained in O(d log 1 ω). We also consider a class of exponential potentials for which the exact solution can be computed efficiently, and give a O(d log d) deterministic algorithm and O(d) randomized algorithm to compute the projection. In particular, we show that one can generalize the KL divergence to a Bregman divergence which is bounded on the simplex (unlike the KL divergence), strongly convex with respect to the l1 norm, and for which one can still solve the projection in expected linear time. In this paper we study Nonnegative Tensor Factorization (NTF) based on the Kullback---Leibler (KL) divergence as an alternative Csiszar---Tusnady procedure. We propose new update rules for the aforementioned divergence that are based on multiplicative update rules. The proposed algorithms are built on solid theoretical foundations that guarantee that the limit point of the iterative algorithm corresponds to a stationary solution of the optimization procedure. Moreover, we study the convergence properties of the optimization procedure and we present generalized pythagorean rules. Furthermore, we provide clear probabilistic interpretations of these algorithms. Finally, we discuss the connections between generalized Probabilistic Tensor Latent Variable Models (PTLVM) and NTF, proposing in that way algorithms for PTLVM for arbitrary multivariate probabilistic mass functions.