Related papers: Block Policy Mirror Descent
The iteration complexity of the block-coordinate descent (BCD) type algorithm has been under extensive investigation. It was recently shown that for convex problems the classical cyclic BCGD (block coordinate gradient descent) achieves an…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…
ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning…
Policy optimization methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants have achieved strong results on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Despite extensive exploration of reward processing strategies and…
We study how to learn $\epsilon$-optimal strategies in zero-sum imperfect information games (IIG) with trajectory feedback. In this setting, players update their policies sequentially based on their observations over a fixed number of…
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…
We present a unified framework based on primal-dual stochastic mirror descent for approximately solving infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) given a generative model. When applied to an average-reward MDP with $A_{tot}$ total…
Stabilizing a dynamical system is a fundamental problem that serves as a cornerstone for many complex tasks in the field of control systems. The problem becomes challenging when the system model is unknown. Among the Reinforcement Learning…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…
Most modern learning problems are highly overparameterized, meaning that there are many more parameters than the number of training data points, and as a result, the training loss may have infinitely many global minima (parameter vectors…
Nonsmooth composite optimization with orthogonality constraints has a wide range of applications in statistical learning and data science. However, this problem is challenging due to its nonsmooth objective and computationally expensive…
Block coordinate descent methods and stochastic subgradient methods have been extensively studied in optimization and machine learning. By combining randomized block sampling with stochastic subgradient methods based on dual averaging, we…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs). For this purpose, some variant of Stochastic Mirror Descent is proposed for convex programming problems with Lipschitz-continuous…
We study an explicit mirror-descent method for finite-horizon deterministic optimal control problems. The method is motivated by Pontryagin's maximum principle: at each iteration, one solves the state and adjoint equations and updates the…
Block-coordinate descent (BCD) is the method of choice to solve numerous large scale optimization problems, however their theoretical study for non-convex optimization, has received less attention. In this paper, we present a new…
Coordinate descent algorithms are widely used in machine learning and large-scale data analysis due to their strong optimality guarantees and impressive empirical performance in solving non-convex problems. In this work, we introduce Block…
This paper revisits the convergence of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) in the contemporary nonconvex optimization setting. Existing results for batch-free nonconvex SMD restrict the choice of the distance generating function (DGF) to be…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…
This paper presents a new convergent Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithm. PnP methods are efficient iterative algorithms for solving image inverse problems formulated as the minimization of the sum of a data-fidelity term and a regularization…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments, particularly when system parameters are unknown. This paper investigates RL-based control for entropy-regularized…