Related papers: Block Policy Mirror Descent
The stochastic gradient (SG) method can minimize an objective function composed of a large number of differentiable functions, or solve a stochastic optimization problem, to a moderate accuracy. The block coordinate descent/update (BCD)…
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice, typically based either on an entropy bonus or a Kullback-Leibler divergence that constrains successive policies. In practice, these…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…
We propose a Block Majorization Minimization method with Extrapolation (BMMe) for solving a class of multi-convex optimization problems. The extrapolation parameters of BMMe are updated using a novel adaptive update rule. By showing that…
We propose a new \textit{randomized Bregman (block) coordinate descent} (RBCD) method for minimizing a composite problem, where the objective function could be either convex or nonconvex, and the smooth part are freed from the global…
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…
Policy mirror descent (PMD) provides a principled framework for reinforcement learning (RL) by iteratively solving KL-regularized policy improvement subproblems. While this approach has been adopted in training advanced LLMs such as Kimi…
The block coordinate descent (BCD) method is widely used for minimizing a continuous function f of several block variables. At each iteration of this method, a single block of variables is optimized, while the remaining variables are held…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a powerful and theoretically sound methodology for sequential decision-making. However, it is not directly applicable to Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to the inaccessibility of explicit action-value…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a popular framework in reinforcement learning, serving as a unifying perspective that encompasses numerous algorithms. These algorithms are derived through the selection of a mirror map and enjoy finite-time…
Modern policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning, such as TRPO and PPO, owe their success to the use of parameterized policies. However, while theoretical guarantees have been established for this class of algorithms, especially…
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…
Block coordinate descent (BCD) methods are prevalent in large scale optimization problems due to the low memory and computational costs per iteration, the predisposition to parallelization, and the ability to exploit the structure of the…
This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…
Explicit exploration in the action space was assumed to be indispensable for online policy gradient methods to avoid a drastic degradation in sample complexity, for solving general reinforcement learning problems over finite state and…
Inspired by the remarkable success of large neural networks, there has been significant interest in understanding the generalization performance of over-parameterized models. Substantial efforts have been invested in characterizing how…
This dissertation explores block decomposable methods for large-scale optimization problems. It focuses on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) schemes and block coordinate descent (BCD) methods. Specifically, it introduces a…
This paper considers the problems of unconstrained minimization of large scale smooth convex functions having block-coordinate-wise Lipschitz continuous gradients. The block coordinate descent (BCD) method are among the first optimization…