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Related papers: Bregman Gradient Policy Optimization

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Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Kaiqing Zhang , Alec Koppel , Hao Zhu , Tamer Başar

Optimizing discrete diffusion model (DDM) with rewards remains a challenge: the non-autoregressive paradigm makes importance sampling intractable and rollout complex, puzzling reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Tianren Ma , Mu Zhang , Yibing Wang , Qixiang Ye

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a practical route to improve large language model reasoning, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a widely used optimizer in this setting. However, RLVR training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tue Le , Linh Ngo Van , Trung Le

This paper presents a novel neural network training approach for faster convergence and better generalization abilities in deep reinforcement learning. Particularly, we focus on the enhancement of training and evaluation performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Mohammed Sharafath Abdul Hameed , Gavneet Singh Chadha , Andreas Schwung , Steven X. Ding

Improving the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning has been a long-standing research problem. In this work, we aim to reduce the sample complexity of existing policy gradient methods. We propose a novel policy gradient algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we provide a simple convergence analysis of proximal gradient algorithm with Bregman distance, which provides a tighter bound than existing result. In particular, for the problem of minimizing a class of convex objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-12-19 Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang , Lixin Shen

We present new policy mirror descent (PMD) methods for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems with either strongly convex or general convex regularizers. By exploring the structural properties of these overall highly nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Guanghui Lan

We develop a general optimization-theoretic framework for Bregman-Variational Learning Dynamics (BVLD), a new class of operator-based updates that unify Bayesian inference, mirror descent, and proximal learning under time-varying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-24 Jinho Cha , Youngchul Kim , Jungmin Shin , Jaeyoung Cho , Seon Jin Kim , Junyeol Ryu

This research reports on the recent development of a black-box optimization method based on single-step deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and on its conceptual proximity to evolution strategy (ES) techniques. In the fashion of policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-29 Jonathan Viquerat , Régis Duvigneau , Philippe Meliga , Alexander Kuhnle , Elie Hachem

Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular and efficient for large-scale reinforcement learning due to their relative stability and incremental nature. In recent years, the empirical success of PG methods has led to the development of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Javad Lavaei

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

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 general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

We propose Dual Approximation Policy Optimization (DAPO), a framework that incorporates general function approximation into policy mirror descent methods. In contrast to the popular approach of using the $L_2$-norm to measure function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Zhihan Xiong , Maryam Fazel , Lin Xiao

We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Zhanhong Jiang , Xian Yeow Lee , Sin Yong Tan , Kai Liang Tan , Aditya Balu , Young M. Lee , Chinmay Hegde , Soumik Sarkar

We introduce Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization, DPPO, an algorithmic framework including best practices for fine-tuning diffusion-based policies (e.g. Diffusion Policy) in continuous control and robot learning tasks using the policy…

Deep reinforcement learning has been able to solve various tasks successfully, however, due to the construction of policy gradient and training dynamics, tuning deep reinforcement learning models remains challenging. As one of the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hanyong Wang , Menglong Yang

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wenye Li , Hongxu Chen , Jiacai Liu , Ke Wei

This paper presents a comprehensive convergence analysis for the mirror descent (MD) method, a widely used algorithm in convex optimization. The key feature of this algorithm is that it provides a generalization of classical gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-16 Mengmou Li , Khaled Laib , Takeshi Hatanaka , Ioannis Lestas