English

Recurrent Natural Policy Gradient for POMDPs

Optimization and Control 2025-10-20 v3 Machine Learning Machine Learning

Abstract

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to the curse of dimensionality induced by the non-stationarity of optimal policies. In this work, we study a natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithm that integrates recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures into a natural policy gradient (NPG) method and a temporal difference (TD) learning method. This framework leverages the representational capacity of RNNs to address non-stationarity in RL to solve POMDPs while retaining the statistical and computational efficiency of natural gradient methods in RL. We provide non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees for this method, including bounds on sample and iteration complexity to achieve global optimality up to function approximation. Additionally, we characterize pathological cases that stem from long-term dependencies, thereby explaining limitations of RNN-based policy optimization for POMDPs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.18221,
  title  = {Recurrent Natural Policy Gradient for POMDPs},
  author = {Semih Cayci and Atilla Eryilmaz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.18221},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:43:55.501Z