Related papers: Approximation Benefits of Policy Gradient Methods …
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
We present two Policy Gradient-based algorithms with general parametrization in the context of infinite-horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). The first one employs Implicit Gradient Transport for variance reduction, ensuring…
This paper proposes a novel termination criterion, termed the advantage gap function, for finite state and action Markov decision processes (MDP) and reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating this advantage gap function into the design…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
Policy learning is a quickly growing area. As robotics and computers control day-to-day life, their error rate needs to be minimized and controlled. There are many policy learning methods and bandit methods with provable error rates that…
We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…
In this work, we study algorithms for learning in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) with function approximation. We first show that the regret analysis of the Politex algorithm (a version of regularized policy…
Estimation of value in policy gradient methods is a fundamental problem. Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) is an exponentially-weighted estimator of an advantage function similar to $\lambda$-return. It substantially reduces the…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
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…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems. They rely on fresh on-policy data, making them sample-inefficient and requiring…
A widely used technique for improving policies is success conditioning, in which one collects trajectories, identifies those that achieve a desired outcome, and updates the policy to imitate the actions taken along successful trajectories.…
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs, have recently shown strong results in pretraining. However, due to their lack of tractable sequence-level likelihoods, they…
Learning optimal policies from historical data enables personalization in a wide variety of applications including healthcare, digital recommendations, and online education. The growing policy learning literature focuses on settings where…
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…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
The success of reinforcement learning (RL) crucially depends on effective function approximation when dealing with complex ground-truth models. Existing sample-efficient RL algorithms primarily employ three approaches to function…
In the secretary problem of Cayley (1875) and Moser (1956), $n$ non-negative, independent, random variables with common distribution are sequentially presented to a decision maker who decides when to stop and collect the most recent…
Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…