Paper ID: 2411.04845

Asymptotic regularity of a generalised stochastic Halpern scheme with applications

Nicholas Pischke, Thomas Powell

We provide abstract, general and highly uniform rates of asymptotic regularity for a generalized stochastic Halpern-style iteration, which incorporates a second mapping in the style of a Krasnoselskii-Mann iteration. This iteration is general in two ways: First, it incorporates stochasticity in a completely abstract way rather than fixing a sampling method; secondly, it includes as special cases stochastic versions of various schemes from the optimization literature, including Halpern's iteration as well as a Krasnoselskii-Mann iteration with Tikhonov regularization terms in the sense of Bo\c{t}, Csetnek and Meier. For these particular cases, we in particular obtain linear rates of asymptotic regularity, matching (or improving) the currently best known rates for these iterations in stochastic optimization, and quadratic rates of asymptotic regularity are obtained in the context of inner product spaces for the general iteration. We utilize these rates to give bounds on the oracle complexity of such iterations under suitable variance assumptions and batching strategies, again presented in an abstract style. Finally, we sketch how the schemes presented here can be instantiated in the context of reinforcement learning to yield novel methods for Q-learning.

Submitted: Nov 7, 2024