51 citations · 90 across the 2 of their papers we have counts for
4 papers · 1 filter
Beyond variance reduction: Understanding the true impact of baselines on policy optimization
Wesley Chung, Valentin Thomas, Marlos C. Machado +1
Bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) problems can often be framed as optimization problems where the goal is to maximize average performance while having access only to stochasti…
On the interplay between noise and curvature and its effect on optimization and generalization
Valentin Thomas, Fabian Pedregosa, Bart van Merriënboer +3
The speed at which one can minimize an expected loss using stochastic methods depends on two properties: the curvature of the loss and the variance of the gradients. While most pre…
Independently Controllable Factors
Valentin Thomas, Jules Pondard, Emmanuel Bengio +6
It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of traini…
Independently Controllable Features
Emmanuel Bengio, Valentin Thomas, Joelle Pineau +2
Finding features that disentangle the different causes of variation in real data is a difficult task, that has nonetheless received considerable attention in static domains like na…