Related papers: An Improved Convergence Analysis of Stochastic Var…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

In this paper, we consider to improve the stochastic variance reduce gradient (SVRG) method via incorporating the curvature information of the objective function. We propose to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients using the…

Variance reduced stochastic gradient (SGD) methods converge significantly faster than the vanilla SGD counterpart. However, these methods are not very practical on large scale problems, as they either i) require frequent passes over the…

We propose an extragradient method with stepsizes bounded away from zero for stochastic variational inequalities requiring only pseudo-monotonicity. We provide convergence and complexity analysis, allowing for an unbounded feasible set,…

In this work, we introduce a stochastic maximum principle (SMP) approach for solving the reinforcement learning problem with the assumption that the unknowns in the environment can be parameterized based on physics knowledge. For the…

Experience replay is a foundational technique in reinforcement learning that enhances learning stability by storing past experiences in a replay buffer and reusing them during training. Despite its practical success, its theoretical…

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large reasoning models (LRMs) using policy-gradient methods such as GRPO. To stabilize training, these methods typically center…

We propose a new way of deriving policy gradient updates for reinforcement learning. Our technique, based on Fourier analysis, recasts integrals that arise with expected policy gradients as convolutions and turns them into multiplications.…

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…

Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly…

Recent advances in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) show that large language models enhance their reasoning abilities when trained with verifiable signals. However, due to reward sparsity, effectiveness depends heavily…

We consider the traffic control problem of dynamic routing over parallel servers, which arises in a variety of engineering systems such as transportation and data transmission. We propose a semi-gradient, on-policy algorithm that learns an…

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…

Various acceleration approaches for Policy Gradient (PG) have been analyzed within the realm of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of the widely used momentum-based acceleration method on PG remains largely…

Despite extreme sample inefficiency, on-policy reinforcement learning, aka policy gradients, has become a fundamental tool in decision-making problems. With the recent advances in GPU-driven simulation, the ability to collect large amounts…

Many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are impractical for training in operational systems or computationally expensive high-fidelity simulations, as they require large amounts of data. Meanwhile, low-fidelity simulators, e.g.,…

We consider the problem of online reinforcement learning for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem modeled as an unknown MDP with an absorbing state. We propose PSRL-SSP, a simple posterior sampling-based reinforcement learning…