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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

Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Saber Salehkaleybar , Sadegh Khorasani , Negar Kiyavash , Niao He , Patrick Thiran

This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Learning in stochastic games is a notoriously difficult problem because, in addition to each other's strategic decisions, the players must also contend with the fact that the game itself evolves over time, possibly in a very complicated…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Angeliki Giannou , Kyriakos Lotidis , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

In this paper, we study a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. While restart strategies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-05 Xinming Wu , Zi Xu , Huiling Zhang

We develop two compression based stochastic gradient algorithms to solve a class of non-smooth strongly convex-strongly concave saddle-point problems in a decentralized setting (without a central server). Our first algorithm is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Chhavi Sharma , Vishnu Narayanan , P. Balamurugan

Many engineering problems have multiple objectives, and the overall aim is to optimize a non-linear function of these objectives. In this paper, we formulate the problem of maximizing a non-linear concave function of multiple long-term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Qinbo Bai , Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Proximal gradient algorithms (PGA), while foundational for inverse problems like image reconstruction, often yield unstable convergence and suboptimal solutions by violating the critical non-negativity constraint. We identify the gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Hanzhang Wang , Zonglin Liu , Jingyi Xu , Chenyang Wang , Zhiwei Zhong , Qiangqiang Shen

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithms have been shown to work favorably in solving large-scale learning problems. Despite the remarkable success, the stochastic gradient complexity of SVRG-type algorithms usually scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Pan Zhou , Xiaotong Yuan

Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Shutong Ding , Jingya Wang , Yali Du , Ye Shi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Adrien Bolland , Gilles Louppe , Damien Ernst

This paper presents a robust reinforcement learning algorithm called robust deterministic policy gradient (RDPG), which reformulates the H-infinity control problem as a two-player zero-sum dynamic game between a user and an adversary. The…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

Policy optimization methods have shown great promise in solving complex reinforcement and imitation learning tasks. While model-free methods are broadly applicable, they often require many samples to optimize complex policies. Model-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Daniel Levy , Stefano Ermon

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Long Yang , Qian Zheng , Gang Pan

We explore a reinforcement learning strategy to automate and accelerate h/p-multigrid methods in high-order solvers. Multigrid methods are very efficient but require fine-tuning of numerical parameters, such as the number of smoothing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 David Huergo , Laura Alonso , Saumitra Joshi , Adrian Juanicoteca , Gonzalo Rubio , Esteban Ferrer

Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Junyu Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Zheng Yu , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-13 Xiyu Yu , Dacheng Tao