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Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-19 Youbang Sun , Mahyar Fazlyab , Shahin Shahrampour

Inspired by the remarkable success of large neural networks, there has been significant interest in understanding the generalization performance of over-parameterized models. Substantial efforts have been invested in characterizing how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Haoyuan Sun , Khashayar Gatmiry , Kwangjun Ahn , Navid Azizan

Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Dong-Sig Han , Hyunseo Kim , Hyundo Lee , Je-Hwan Ryu , Byoung-Tak Zhang

We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Tao Liu , Ruida Zhou , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-23 Emmeran Johnson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Patrick Rebeschini

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) stands as a versatile algorithmic framework encompassing several seminal policy gradient algorithms such as natural policy gradient, with connections with state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Kimon Protopapas , Anas Barakat

Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Ofir Schlisselberg , Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 David M. Bossens , Atsushi Nitanda

Explicit exploration in the action space was assumed to be indispensable for online policy gradient methods to avoid a drastic degradation in sample complexity, for solving general reinforcement learning problems over finite state and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan

Based on the ideas of arXiv:1710.06612, we consider the problem of minimization of the Holder-continuous non-smooth functional $f$ with non-positive convex (generally, non-smooth) Lipschitz-continuous functional constraint. We propose some…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Fedor Stonyakin , Alexey Stepanov , Alexander Gasnikov , Alexander Titov

Distance metric learning (DML), which learns a distance metric from labeled "similar" and "dissimilar" data pairs, is widely utilized. Recently, several works investigate orthogonality-promoting regularization (OPR), which encourages the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-19 Pengtao Xie , Wei Wu , Yichen Zhu , Eric P. Xing

This paper explores a new framework for reinforcement learning based on online convex optimization, in particular mirror descent and related algorithms. Mirror descent can be viewed as an enhanced gradient method, particularly suited to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sridhar Mahadevan , Bo Liu

We apply functional acceleration to the Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) general family of algorithms, which cover a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Leveraging duality, we propose a momentum-based PMD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Veronica Chelu , Doina Precup

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of an average function of a large number of smooth convex components and a general, possibly non-differentiable, convex function. Although many methods have been proposed to solve this problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-01 Le Thi Khanh Hien , Cuong V. Nguyen , Huan Xu , Canyi Lu , Jiashi Feng

Low-rank and nonsmooth matrix optimization problems capture many fundamental tasks in statistics and machine learning. While significant progress has been made in recent years in developing efficient methods for \textit{smooth} low-rank…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-10 Dan Garber , Atara Kaplan

Relative smoothness - a notion introduced by Birnbaum et al. (2011) and rediscovered by Bauschke et al. (2016) and Lu et al. (2016) - generalizes the standard notion of smoothness typically used in the analysis of gradient type methods. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-25 Filip Hanzely , Peter Richtárik

This paper seeks to address how to solve non-smooth convex and strongly convex optimization problems with functional constraints. The introduced Mirror Descent (MD) method with adaptive stepsizes is shown to have a better convergence rate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-08 Anastasia Bayandina

In this paper some adaptive mirror descent algorithms for problems of minimization convex objective functional with several convex Lipschitz (generally, non-smooth) functional constraints are considered. It is shown that the methods are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-20 F. S. Stonyakin , M . S. Alkousa , A. A. Titov

This paper examines reinforcement learning (RL) in infinite-horizon decision processes with almost-sure safety constraints, crucial for applications like autonomous systems, finance, and resource management. We propose a doubly-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Pekka Malo , Lauri Viitasaari , Antti Suominen , Eeva Vilkkumaa , Olli Tahvonen