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The paper concerns optimization problems with general equality and inequality constraints and with constraints expressed by a convex set. In order to solve these problems, the general constraints are treated by an exact penalty functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Bogdan K. Jastrzębski , Radosław Pytlak

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan

In this work, we investigate the idea of variance reduction by studying its properties with general adaptive mirror descent algorithms in nonsmooth nonconvex finite-sum optimization problems. We propose a simple yet generalized framework…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Wenjie Li , Zhanyu Wang , Yichen Zhang , Guang Cheng

In this paper, we introduce a stochastic projected subgradient method for weakly convex (i.e., uniformly prox-regular) nonsmooth, nonconvex functions---a wide class of functions which includes the additive and convex composite classes. At a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-19 Damek Davis , Benjamin Grimmer

In this paper we investigate the convergence of the Policy Iteration Algorithm (PIA) for a class of general continuous-time entropy-regularized stochastic control problems. In particular, instead of employing sophisticated PDE estimates for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-24 Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang , Jianfeng Zhang

Recently there were proposed some innovative convex optimization concepts, namely, relative smoothness [1] and relative strong convexity [2,3]. These approaches have significantly expanded the class of applicability of gradient-type methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-19 Fedor Stonyakin , Alexander Titov , Mohammad Alkousa , Oleg Savchuk , Alexander Gasnikov

We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-18 Vikram Krishnamurthy , Felisa Vazquez Abad

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 W. J. A. van Heeswijk

Many descent algorithms for multiobjective optimization have been developed in the last two decades. Tanabe et al. (Comput Optim Appl 72(2):339--361, 2019) proposed a proximal gradient method for multiobjective optimization, which can solve…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-11 Hiroki Tanabe , Ellen H. Fukuda , Nobuo Yamashita

We prove the weak and the strong convergence of the trajectories of the continuous gradient projection method under some mild assumptions on the objective function and the step size function. Moreover, we estimate the decay rate to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-30 Ramzi May

Recently, policy optimization for control purposes has received renewed attention due to the increasing interest in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we investigate the global convergence of gradient-based policy optimization methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-25 Joao Paulo Jansch-Porto , Bin Hu , Geir Dullerud

In practice, optimization tasks have some structure that allows developing new algorithms for every problem with faster convergence rates. Using the structure of optimization tasks, we can propose algorithms with more optimistic convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-01 Alexander Tyurin

Ill-posed linear inverse problems appear in many scientific setups, and are typically addressed by solving optimization problems, which are composed of data fidelity and prior terms. Recently, several works have considered a back-projection…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-10 Tom Tirer , Raja Giryes

In this paper, we establish new convergence results for the quantized distributed gradient descent and suggest a novel strategy of choosing the stepsizes for the high-performance of the algorithm. Under the strongly convexity assumption on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-03 Woocheol Choi , Myeong-Su Lee

Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Hyunin Lee , Javad Lavaei

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning robotics controllers. It has recently been shown that algorithms based on finite-difference estimates of the policy gradient are competitive with algorithms based on the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Osbert Bastani

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Stochastic gradient methods are among the most important algorithms in training machine learning problems. While classical assumptions such as strong convexity allow a simple analysis they are rarely satisfied in applications. In recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Simon Weissmann , Sara Klein , Waïss Azizian , Leif Döring