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Related papers: Policy Optimization as Wasserstein Gradient Flows

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This work presents a new Distributionally Robust Optimization approach, using $p$-Wasserstein metrics, to analyze a stochastic program in a general context. The ambiguity set in this approach depends on the decision variable and is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-08 Diego Fonseca , Mauricio Junca

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved state-of-the-art results in domains such as robotics and games. We build on this previous work by applying RL algorithms to a selection of canonical online stochastic optimization problems with a…

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has gained prominence in operations research and machine learning as a powerful method for achieving solutions with favorable out-of-sample performance. Two compelling explanations for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Qinyu Wu , Jonathan Yu-Meng Li , Tiantian Mao

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved significant breakthroughs in various tasks. However, most DRL algorithms suffer a problem of generalizing the learned policy which makes the learning performance largely affected even by minor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Zhengyao Jiang , Shan Luo

This research reports on the recent development of a black-box optimization method based on single-step deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and on its conceptual proximity to evolution strategy (ES) techniques. In the fashion of policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-29 Jonathan Viquerat , Régis Duvigneau , Philippe Meliga , Alexander Kuhnle , Elie Hachem

In recent years, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to many different continuous control tasks. While RL algorithms are often conceptually simple, their state-of-the-art implementations take numerous low-…

Many tasks in machine learning and signal processing can be solved by minimizing a convex function of a measure. This includes sparse spikes deconvolution or training a neural network with a single hidden layer. For these problems, we study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-30 Lenaic Chizat , Francis Bach

Wasserstein gradient flow has emerged as a promising approach to solve optimization problems over the space of probability distributions. A recent trend is to use the well-known JKO scheme in combination with input convex neural networks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Jiaojiao Fan , Qinsheng Zhang , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-09 Héctor Ratia , Luis Montesano , Ruben Martinez-Cantin

Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for model-based reinforcement learning, enabling high sample efficiency by backpropagating gradients through differentiable dynamics. However, prior RPG approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hai Zhong , Zhuoran Li , Xun Wang , Longbo Huang

Despite empirical success, the theory of reinforcement learning (RL) with value function approximation remains fundamentally incomplete. Prior work has identified a variety of pathological behaviours that arise in RL algorithms that combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Kenny Young , Richard S. Sutton

With the ongoing investment in data collection and communication technology in power systems, data-driven optimization has been established as a powerful tool for system operators to handle stochastic system states caused by weather- and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-18 Robert Mieth , Juan M. Morales , H. Vincent Poor

We introduce Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization, DPPO, an algorithmic framework including best practices for fine-tuning diffusion-based policies (e.g. Diffusion Policy) in continuous control and robot learning tasks using the policy…

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Jun Song , Chaoyue Zhao

Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Yisong Yue , Animashree Anandkumar

In this article, we formulate topology optimization problems concerning the mass distribution as minimization problems for functionals on the Wasserstein space. We relax optimization problems regarding non-convex objective functions on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Fumiya Okazaki , Takayuki Yamada

Robust optimization is a tractable and expressive technique for decision-making under uncertainty, but it can lead to overly conservative decisions when pessimistic assumptions are made on the uncertain parameters. Wasserstein…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Irina Wang , Cole Becker , Bart Van Parys , Bartolomeo Stellato

This paper presents an approach for data-driven policy refinement in reinforcement learning, specifically designed for safety-critical applications. Our methodology leverages the strengths of data-driven optimization and reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Ali Baheri

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz