Related papers: Policy Mirror Descent for Reinforcement Learning: …
In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…
Recent work by Woodworth et al. (2020) shows that the optimization dynamics of gradient descent for overparameterized problems can be viewed as low-dimensional dual dynamics induced by a mirror map, explaining the implicit regularization…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in complex tasks but struggles in multi-task settings with different embodiments. World model methods offer scalability by learning a simulation of the environment but often rely on…
This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…
Low-rank modeling has a lot of important applications in machine learning, computer vision and social network analysis. While the matrix rank is often approximated by the convex nuclear norm, the use of nonconvex low-rank regularizers has…
We consider the constrained sampling problem where the goal is to sample from a target distribution $\pi(x)\propto e^{-f(x)}$ when $x$ is constrained to lie on a convex body $\mathcal{C}$. Motivated by penalty methods from continuous…
We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance…
Low-rank modeling has many important applications in computer vision and machine learning. While the matrix rank is often approximated by the convex nuclear norm, the use of nonconvex low-rank regularizers has demonstrated better empirical…
As the problem of minimizing functionals on the Wasserstein space encompasses many applications in machine learning, different optimization algorithms on $\mathbb{R}^d$ have received their counterpart analog on the Wasserstein space. We…
In this paper, we propose and analyse a family of generalised stochastic composite mirror descent algorithms. With adaptive step sizes, the proposed algorithms converge without requiring prior knowledge of the problem. Combined with an…
In this paper, we investigate the power of {\it regularization}, a common technique in reinforcement learning and optimization, in solving extensive-form games (EFGs). We propose a series of new algorithms based on regularizing the payoff…
Owing to their connection with generative adversarial networks (GANs), saddle-point problems have recently attracted considerable interest in machine learning and beyond. By necessity, most theoretical guarantees revolve around…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) encompasses diverse paradigms, including model-based RL, policy-based RL, and value-based RL, each tailored to approximate the model, optimal policy, and optimal value function, respectively. This work…
We study the setting of \emph{performative reinforcement learning} where the deployed policy affects both the reward, and the transition of the underlying Markov decision process. Prior work~\parencite{MTR23} has addressed this problem…
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,…
Consider linear ill-posed problems governed by the system $A_i x = y_i$ for $i =1, \cdots, p$, where each $A_i$ is a bounded linear operator from a Banach space $X$ to a Hilbert space $Y_i$. In case $p$ is huge, solving the problem by an…
In this paper, we investigate the non-asymptotic stationary convergence behavior of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) for nonconvex optimization. We focus on a general class of nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic optimization problems, in which…
Many problems in machine learning can be formulated as optimizing a convex functional over a vector space of measures. This paper studies the convergence of the mirror descent algorithm in this infinite-dimensional setting. Defining Bregman…
Recently there has been a surge of interest in understanding implicit regularization properties of iterative gradient-based optimization algorithms. In this paper, we study the statistical guarantees on the excess risk achieved by…