Related papers: On the Convergence Rates of Policy Gradient Method…
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…
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…
In this short note, we give the convergence analysis of the policy in the recent famous policy mirror descent (PMD). We mainly consider the unregularized setting following [11] with generalized Bregman divergence. The difference is that we…
This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…
Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…
We study the global convergence of policy gradient for infinite-horizon, continuous state and action space, and entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs). We consider a softmax policy with (one-hidden layer) neural network…
We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…
We make three contributions toward better understanding policy gradient methods in the tabular setting. First, we show that with the true gradient, policy gradient with a softmax parametrization converges at a $O(1/t)$ rate, with constants…
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…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
While the optimization landscape of policy gradient methods has been recently investigated for partially observed linear systems in terms of both static output feedback and dynamical controllers, they only provide convergence guarantees to…
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 study the global linear convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods for finite-horizon continuous-time exploratory linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems. The setting includes stochastic LQC problems with indefinite costs and allows…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…
Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…
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…
Owing to the growth of interest in Reinforcement Learning in the last few years, gradient based policy control methods have been gaining popularity for Control problems as well. And rightly so, since gradient policy methods have the…