Related papers: Quasi-Newton Trust Region Policy Optimization

We propose a trust-region type method for a class of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems where the objective function is a summation of a (probably nonconvex) smooth function and a (probably nonsmooth) convex function. The model…

Quasi-Newton methods form an important class of methods for solving nonlinear optimization problems. In such methods, first order information is used to approximate the second derivative. The aim is to mimic the fast convergence that can be…

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) can be risky and, in various circumstances, can produce sub-optimal models that hurt performance when deployed. Safe CLTR was introduced to mitigate these risks when using inverse propensity scoring to…

We propose a novel algorithm, termed soft quasi-Newton (soft QN), for optimization in the presence of bounded noise. Traditional quasi-Newton algorithms are vulnerable to such perturbations. To develop a more robust quasi-Newton method, we…

For solving large-scale non-convex problems, we propose inexact variants of trust region and adaptive cubic regularization methods, which, to increase efficiency, incorporate various approximations. In particular, in addition to approximate…

In this paper, we consider stochastic second-order methods for minimizing a finite summation of nonconvex functions. One important key is to find an ingenious but cheap scheme to incorporate local curvature information. Since the true…

We propose a stochastic nonconvex optimization algorithm that achieves almost sure $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-1.5})$ iteration complexity for problems with smooth objective functions and gradients only observable with noise. The…

We present an augmented Lagrangian trust-region method to efficiently solve constrained optimization problems governed by large-scale nonlinear systems with application to partial differential equation-constrained optimization. At each…

Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…

For distributed computing with Byzantine machines under Privacy Protection (PP) constraints, this paper develops a robust PP distributed quasi-Newton estimation, which only requires the node machines to transmit five vectors to the central…

In this paper, we study structured quasi-Newton methods for optimization problems with orthogonality constraints. Note that the Riemannian Hessian of the objective function requires both the Euclidean Hessian and the Euclidean gradient. In…

We present two sampled quasi-Newton methods (sampled LBFGS and sampled LSR1) for solving empirical risk minimization problems that arise in machine learning. Contrary to the classical variants of these methods that sequentially build…

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is an iterative method that simultaneously maximizes a surrogate objective and enforces a trust region constraint over consecutive policies in each iteration. The combination of the surrogate…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), recently introduced by DeepSeek, is a critic-free reinforcement learning algorithm for fine-tuning large language models. GRPO replaces the value function in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with…

We develop R2N, a modified quasi-Newton method for minimizing the sum of a $\mathcal{C}^1$ function $f$ and a lower semi-continuous prox-bounded $h$. Both $f$ and $h$ may be nonconvex. At each iteration, our method computes a step by…

Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…

Neural Network based approximations of the Value function make up the core of leading Policy Based methods such as Trust Regional Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). While this adds significant value when…

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Uncertainty estimation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical component in control tasks where agents must balance safe exploration and efficient learning. While deep neural networks have enabled breakthroughs in RL, they often lack…

Trust region-based optimization methods have become foundational reinforcement learning algorithms that offer stability and strong empirical performance in continuous control tasks. Growing interest in scalable and reusable control policies…