Generalized Gradient Estimation for Variational Autoencoders and Reinforcement Learning

Author(s)	Hyacinthe Hamon
Country	France
Abstract	This work presents a generalized gradient estimator that optimizes expectations involving known or black-box functions for discrete and continuous random variables. We synthesize and extend standard methods for constructing gradient estimators, offering a framework that incurs minimal computational overhead. Our proposed approach demonstrates effectiveness in variational autoencoders and introduces a straightforward extension to reinforcement learning, accommodating discrete and continuous action settings. Experiment-tal results reveal improved training performance and sample efficiency, highlighting the utility of our estimator in various domains. Future applications include training models with complex attention mechanisms, continuous latent-variable models with non-differentiable likelihoods, and integrating our method with existing variance-reduction techniques and optimization methods in reinforcement learning.
Keywords	Gradient Estimation, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Reinforcement Learning, Reparameterization Trick, Control Variates, Policy Gradient Methods
Field	Computer > Artificial Intelligence / Simulation / Virtual Reality
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 1, January-February 2025
Published On	2025-02-27
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i01.36861

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