On Matrix Momentum Stochastic Approximation and Applications to Q-learning

Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms are recursive techniques used to obtain the roots of functions that can be expressed as expectations of a noisy parameterized family of functions. In this paper two new SA algorithms are introduced: 1) PolSA, an extension of Polyak's momentum technique with a specially designed matrix momentum, and 2) NeSA, which can either be regarded as a variant of Nesterov's acceleration method, or a simplification of PolSA. The rates of convergence of SA algorithms is well understood. Under special conditions, the mean square error of the parameter estimates is bounded by σ
²
/n+o(1/n), where σ
²
≥ 0 is an identifiable constant. If these conditions fail, the rate is typically sub-linear. There are two well known SA algorithms that ensure a linear rate, with minimal value of variance, σ
²
: the Ruppert-Polyak averaging technique, and the stochastic Newton-Raphson (SNR) algorithm. It is demonstrated here that under mild technical assumptions, the PolSA algorithm also achieves this optimality criteria. This result is established via novel coupling arguments: It is shown that the parameter estimates obtained from the PolSA algorithm couple with those of the optimal variance (but computationally more expensive) SNR algorithm, at a rate O(1/n
²
). The newly proposed algorithms are extended to a reinforcement learning setting to obtain new Q-learning algorithms, and numerical results confirm the coupling of PolSA and SNR.