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Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

We study an explicit mirror-descent method for finite-horizon deterministic optimal control problems. The method is motivated by Pontryagin's maximum principle: at each iteration, one solves the state and adjoint equations and updates the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-05 Ye Feng , Jianfeng Lu

We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a general class of continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) having smooth Bellman operators. Given access to a generative model, we achieve rate-optimal sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Davide Maran , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli

Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-18 William Montgomery , Sergey Levine

Mirror Descent is a popular algorithm, that extends Gradients Descent (GD) beyond the Euclidean geometry. One of its benefits is to enable strong convergence guarantees through smooth-like analyses, even for objectives with exploding or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-19 Hadrien Hendrikx

In this work, we investigate the idea of variance reduction by studying its properties with general adaptive mirror descent algorithms in nonsmooth nonconvex finite-sum optimization problems. We propose a simple yet generalized framework…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Wenjie Li , Zhanyu Wang , Yichen Zhang , Guang Cheng

In this paper, we analyze the mirror descent algorithm for non-smooth optimization problems in which the objective function is relatively strongly convex, without relying on the standard Lipschitz continuity assumption commonly used in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Mohammad S. Alkousa , Fedor S. Stonyakin

Learning-to-optimize is an emerging framework that seeks to speed up the solution of certain optimization problems by leveraging training data. Learned optimization solvers have been shown to outperform classical optimization algorithms in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-27 Hong Ye Tan , Subhadip Mukherjee , Junqi Tang , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

The paper is devoted to new modifications of recently proposed adaptive methods of Mirror Descent for convex minimization problems in the case of several convex functional constraints. Methods for problems of two classes are considered. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-29 Fedor S. Stonyakin , Mohammad S. Alkousa , Alexey N. Stepanov , Maxim A. Barinov

Recently there were proposed some innovative convex optimization concepts, namely, relative smoothness [1] and relative strong convexity [2,3]. These approaches have significantly expanded the class of applicability of gradient-type methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-19 Fedor Stonyakin , Alexander Titov , Mohammad Alkousa , Oleg Savchuk , Alexander Gasnikov

We consider the problem of solving robust Markov decision process (MDP), which involves a set of discounted, finite state, finite action space MDPs with uncertain transition kernels. The goal of planning is to find a robust policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

In this paper, the optimal convergence rate $O\left(N^{-1/2}\right)$ (where $N$ is the total number of iterations performed by the algorithm), without the presence of a logarithmic factor, is proved for mirror descent algorithms with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-04 Mohammad Alkousa , Fedor Stonyakin , Asmaa Abdo , Mohammad Alcheikh

Many statistical $M$-estimators are based on convex optimization problems formed by the combination of a data-dependent loss function with a norm-based regularizer. We analyze the convergence rates of projected gradient and composite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-07-26 Alekh Agarwal , Sahand N. Negahban , Martin J. Wainwright

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a general class of policy mirror descent methods, all with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Lin Xiao

This work proposes an efficient batch algorithm for feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL) with theoretical convergence guarantees. To mitigate the estimation bias inherent in conventional regularization schemes, the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Kyohei Suzuki , Konstantinos Slavakis

Online learning algorithms are fast, memory-efficient, easy to implement, and applicable to many prediction problems, including classification, regression, and ranking. Several online algorithms were proposed in the past few decades, some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-03 Francesco Orabona , Koby Crammer , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Ted Moskovitz , Brendan O'Donoghue , Vivek Veeriah , Sebastian Flennerhag , Satinder Singh , Tom Zahavy

Most modern learning problems are highly overparameterized, meaning that there are many more parameters than the number of training data points, and as a result, the training loss may have infinitely many global minima (parameter vectors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Navid Azizan , Sahin Lale , Babak Hassibi

Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. This paper proposes $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ algorithm: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent. In $\mathtt{VRMPO}$, a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Long Yang , Yu Zhang , Gang Zheng , Qian Zheng , Pengfei Li , Jianhang Huang , Jun Wen , Gang Pan

Stochastic mirror descent (SMD) is a fairly new family of algorithms that has recently found a wide range of applications in optimization, machine learning, and control. It can be considered a generalization of the classical stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-04 Navid Azizan , Babak Hassibi