Related papers: A Hybrid Stochastic Policy Gradient Algorithm for …
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…
In a real Hilbert space setting, we study the convergence properties of an inexact gradient algorithm featuring both viscous and Hessian driven damping for convex differentiable optimization. In this algorithm, the gradient evaluation can…
We propose risk-sensitive reinforcement learning algorithms catering to three families of risk measures, namely expectiles, utility-based shortfall risk and optimized certainty equivalent risk. For each risk measure, in the context of a…
We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…
We introduce deterministic perturbation schemes for the recently proposed random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA) [17], and propose new first-order and second-order algorithms. In the latter case, these are the first second-order…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…
High-probability analysis of stochastic first-order optimization methods under mild assumptions on the noise has been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. Typically, gradient clipping is one of the key algorithmic ingredients to…
Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…
This note reconciles two seemingly distinct approaches to policy gradient optimization for the Pass@K objective in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: (1) direct REINFORCE-style methods, and (2) advantage-shaping techniques that…
Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…
We first propose a decentralized proximal stochastic gradient tracking method (DProxSGT) for nonconvex stochastic composite problems, with data heterogeneously distributed on multiple workers in a decentralized connected network. To save…
In the paper, we propose a class of efficient momentum-based policy gradient methods for the model-free reinforcement learning, which use adaptive learning rates and do not require any large batches. Specifically, we propose a fast…
We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…
In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…
We consider the problem of control in the setting of reinforcement learning (RL), where model information is not available. Policy gradient algorithms are a popular solution approach for this problem and are usually shown to converge to a…
This paper discusses theoretical and experimental aspects of gradient-based approaches to the direct optimization of policy performance in controlled POMDPs. We introduce GPOMDP, a REINFORCE-like algorithm for estimating an approximation to…