Related papers: Provably Efficient Convergence of Primal-Dual Acto…

We study the linear convergence rates of the proximal gradient method for composite functions satisfying two classes of Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) inequality: the PL inequality, the variant of PL inequality defined by the proximal map-based…

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

This paper focuses on stochastic methods for solving smooth non-convex strongly-concave min-max problems, which have received increasing attention due to their potential applications in deep learning (e.g., deep AUC maximization,…

Adaptive gradient-descent optimizers are the standard choice for training neural network models. Despite their faster convergence than gradient-descent and remarkable performance in practice, the adaptive optimizers are not as well…

In this paper, a new variant of accelerated gradient descent is proposed. The pro-posed method does not require any information about the objective function, usesexact line search for the practical accelerations of convergence, converges…

This work studies a class of non-smooth decentralized multi-agent optimization problems where the agents aim at minimizing a sum of local strongly-convex smooth components plus a common non-smooth term. We propose a general primal-dual…

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

We show that the augmented primal-dual gradient algorithms can achieve global exponential convergence with partially strongly convex functions. In particular, the objective function only needs to be strongly convex in the subspace…

In this note, we establish a new exact worst-case linear convergence rate of the proximal gradient method in terms of the proximal gradient norm, which complements the recent results in [1] and implies a refined descent lemma.descent lemma.…

We introduce a notion of inexact model of a convex objective function, which allows for errors both in the function and in its gradient. For this situation, a gradient method with an adaptive adjustment of some parameters of the model is…

Dual first-order methods are powerful techniques for large-scale convex optimization. Although an extensive research effort has been devoted to studying their convergence properties, explicit convergence rates for the primal iterates have…

We develop a novel primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth and nonlinear compositional convex minimization problems, which covers many existing and brand-new models as special cases. Our approach relies on a combination of a new…

Actor-critic (AC) is a powerful method for learning an optimal policy in reinforcement learning, where the critic uses algorithms, e.g., temporal difference (TD) learning with function approximation, to evaluate the current policy and the…

Solutions of optimization problems, including policy optimization in reinforcement learning, typically rely upon some variant of gradient descent. There has been much recent work in the machine learning, control, and optimization…

We prove that the norm version of the adaptive stochastic gradient method (AdaGrad-Norm) achieves a linear convergence rate for a subset of either strongly convex functions or non-convex functions that satisfy the Polyak Lojasiewicz (PL)…

In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…

In 1963, Polyak proposed a simple condition that is sufficient to show a global linear convergence rate for gradient descent. This condition is a special case of the \L{}ojasiewicz inequality proposed in the same year, and it does not…

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Actor-critic methods have achieved significant success in many challenging applications. However, its finite-time convergence is still poorly understood in the most practical single-timescale form. Existing works on analyzing…