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Related papers: An operator view of policy gradient methods

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Reinforcement learning constantly deals with hard integrals, for example when computing expectations in policy evaluation and policy iteration. These integrals are rarely analytically solvable and typically estimated with the Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Sebastien M. R. Arnold , Pierre L'Ecuyer , Liyu Chen , Yi-fan Chen , Fei Sha

A gradient recovery operator based on projecting the discrete gradient onto the standard finite element space is considered. We use an oblique projection, where the test and trial spaces are different, and the bases of these two spaces form…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2013-05-02 Bishnu P. Lamichhane , Adam McNeily

In this paper, we consider discrete-time infinite horizon problems of optimal control to a terminal set of states. These are the problems that are often taken as the starting point for adaptive dynamic programming. Under very general…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-10-05 Dimitri P. Bertsekas

While there is an extensive body of research analyzing policy gradient methods for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on policy gradient methods for average-reward MDPs has been limited, with most existing results restricted to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-23 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

We propose a new reconstruction operator that aims to recover the missing parts of a function given the observed parts. This new operator belongs to a new, very large class of functional operators which includes the classical regression…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-14 Alois Kneip , Dominik Liebl

We consider the infinite-horizon discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. We focus on several approximate variations of the Policy Iteration algorithm: Approximate Policy Iteration, Conservative Policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-13 Bruno Scherrer

Recent months have seen the emergence of a powerful new trend in which large language models (LLMs) are augmented to become autonomous language agents capable of performing objective oriented multi-step tasks on their own, rather than…

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Tyler Westenbroek , Jacob Levy , David Fridovich-Keil

Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 João Carvalho , Davide Tateo , Fabio Muratore , Jan Peters

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Chao Wen , Xiaoyang Tan

Policy gradient is an effective way to estimate continuous action on the environment. This paper, it about explaining the mathematical formula and code implementation. In the end, comparing between the rotation angle of the stick on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Mingwei Shi

Behavior constrained policy optimization has been demonstrated to be a successful paradigm for tackling Offline Reinforcement Learning. By exploiting historical transitions, a policy is trained to maximize a learned value function while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Jiachen Li , Edwin Zhang , Ming Yin , Qinxun Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang , William Yang Wang

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models such as OpenVLA, Octo, and $\pi_0$ have shown strong generalization by leveraging large-scale demonstrations, yet their performance is still fundamentally constrained by the quality and coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Mingyang Lyu , Yinqian Sun , Erliang Lin , Huangrui Li , Ruolin Chen , Feifei Zhao , Yi Zeng

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

In optimal control problem, policy iteration (PI) is a powerful reinforcement learning (RL) tool used for designing optimal controller for the linear systems. However, the need for an initial stabilizing control policy significantly limits…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-13 Zhen Pang , Shengda Tang , Jun Cheng , Shuping He

Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) enhances large language models by estimating advantages across a group of sampled trajectories. However, mapping these trajectory-level advantages to policy updates requires aggregating token-level…

Policy-gradient methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are typically updated along a single stochastic gradient direction, leaving the rich local structure of the parameter space unexplored. Previous work has shown that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xinyu Zhang , Aishik Deb , Klaus Mueller

In the paper, we design a novel Bregman gradient policy optimization framework for reinforcement learning based on Bregman divergences and momentum techniques. Specifically, we propose a Bregman gradient policy optimization (BGPO) algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Feihu Huang , Shangqian Gao , Heng Huang

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Gavin McCracken , Colin Daniels , Rosie Zhao , Anna Brandenberger , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup

Inverse Reinforcement Learning addresses the problem of inferring an expert's reward function from demonstrations. However, in many applications, we not only have access to the expert's near-optimal behavior, but we also observe part of her…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Giorgia Ramponi , Gianluca Drappo , Marcello Restelli