Related papers: Convergence and Optimality of Policy Gradient Meth…
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…
We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear policy class. Using the compatible function approximation…
In this paper, we propose a unified convergence analysis for a class of generic shuffling-type gradient methods for solving finite-sum optimization problems. Our analysis works with any sampling without replacement strategy and covers many…
Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control…
Due to the non-smoothness of optimization problems in Machine Learning, generalized smoothness assumptions have been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. One of the most popular assumptions of this type is $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness…
Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) tackles sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints, which are often formulated as…
The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…
Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…
The stochastic gradient descent has been widely used for solving composite optimization problems in big data analyses. Many algorithms and convergence properties have been developed. The composite functions were convex primarily and…
Stochastic gradient methods are dominant in nonconvex optimization especially for deep models but have low asymptotical convergence due to the fixed smoothness. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method for improving…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods with entropy regularization achieve impressive empirical success in reinforcement learning problems with large state-action spaces. However, their convergence properties and the impact of entropy…
We provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of gradient clipping in training deep neural networks. The key ingredient is a new smoothness condition derived from practical neural network training examples. We observe that…
We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…
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 order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…
We introduce a notion of inexact model of a convex objective function, which allows for errors both in the function and in its gradient. For this situation, a gradient method with an adaptive adjustment of some parameters of the model is…
Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…
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…