Related papers: Block Policy Mirror Descent
We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…
Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…
Policy gradient methods equipped with deep neural networks have achieved great success in solving high-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, current analyses cannot explain why they are resistant to the curse of…
In this paper, we provide a unified iteration complexity analysis for a family of general block coordinate descent (BCD) methods, covering popular methods such as the block coordinate gradient descent (BCGD) and the block coordinate…
Stochastic multi-objective optimization (SMOO) has recently emerged as a powerful framework for addressing machine learning problems with multiple objectives. The bias introduced by the nonlinearity of the subproblem solution mapping…
We study Concave Constrained Markov Decision Processes (Concave CMDPs) where both the objective and constraints are defined as concave functions of the state-action occupancy measure. We propose the Variance-Reduced Primal-Dual Policy…
We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from…
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…
Projected policy gradient (PPG) is a basic policy optimization method in reinforcement learning. Given access to exact policy evaluations, previous studies have established the sublinear convergence of PPG for sufficiently small step sizes…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…
We present the Multilevel Bregman Proximal Gradient Descent (ML BPGD) method, a novel multilevel optimization framework tailored to constrained convex problems with relative Lipschitz smoothness. Our approach extends the classical…
We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) is a common policy optimization algorithm and can be viewed as mirror ascent in the space of probabilities. Recently, Vaswani et al. [2021] introduced a policy gradient method that corresponds to mirror ascent…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
This paper seeks to address how to solve non-smooth convex and strongly convex optimization problems with functional constraints. The introduced Mirror Descent (MD) method with adaptive stepsizes is shown to have a better convergence rate…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
We study average-reward Markov decision processes (AMDPs) and develop novel first-order methods with strong theoretical guarantees for both policy optimization and policy evaluation. Compared with intensive research efforts in finite sample…
Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…
Despite perfectly interpolating the training data, deep neural networks (DNNs) can often generalize fairly well, in part due to the "implicit regularization" induced by the learning algorithm. Nonetheless, various forms of regularization,…
Two types of low cost-per-iteration gradient descent methods have been extensively studied in parallel. One is online or stochastic gradient descent (OGD/SGD), and the other is randomzied coordinate descent (RBCD). In this paper, we combine…