Related papers: Beyond Exact Gradients: Convergence of Stochastic …
We study robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) with general policy parameterization under s-rectangular and non-rectangular uncertainty sets. Prior work is largely limited to tabular policies, and hence either lacks sample complexity…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…
We propose an extragradient method with stepsizes bounded away from zero for stochastic variational inequalities requiring only pseudo-monotonicity. We provide convergence and complexity analysis, allowing for an unbounded feasible set,…
Following [21, 23], the present work investigates a new relative entropy-regularized algorithm for solving the optimal transport on a graph problem within the randomized shortest paths formalism. More precisely, a unit flow is injected into…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key driver of language model reasoning. Among RL algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is the de facto standard, avoiding the need for a critic by using per-prompt baselines and…
We propose expected policy gradients (EPG), which unify stochastic policy gradients (SPG) and deterministic policy gradients (DPG) for reinforcement learning. Inspired by expected sarsa, EPG integrates (or sums) across actions when…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$…
Sample-based trajectory optimisers are a promising tool for the control of robotics with non-differentiable dynamics and cost functions. Contemporary approaches derive from a restricted subclass of stochastic optimal control where the…
We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…
Large language model (LLM) alignment via reinforcement learning from human preferences (RLHF) suffers from unstable policy updates, ambiguous gradient directions, poor interpretability, and high gradient variance in mainstream pairwise…
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…
We consider the problem of estimating a probability distribution that maximizes the entropy while satisfying a finite number of moment constraints, possibly corrupted by noise. Based on duality of convex programming, we present a novel…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm PPG (Proximal Policy Gradient), which is close to both VPG (vanilla policy gradient) and PPO (proximal policy optimization). The PPG objective is a partial variation of the VPG objective and the…
While the idea of robust dynamic programming (DP) is compelling for systems affected by uncertainty, addressing worst-case disturbances generally results in excessive conservatism. This paper introduces a method for constructing control…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) provide a promising framework for computing reliable policies in the face of model errors. Many successful reinforcement learning algorithms build on variations of policy-gradient methods, but…
This paper is devoted to first-order algorithms for smooth convex optimization with inexact gradients. Unlike the majority of the literature on this topic, we consider the setting of relative rather than absolute inexactness. More…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…
The advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from reactive ``fast thinking'' text generation to systematic, step-by-step ``slow thinking'' reasoning, unlocking state-of-the-art performance in complex…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…