Related papers: Provably Efficient Convergence of Primal-Dual Acto…
Primal-dual methods for solving convex optimization problems with functional constraints often exhibit a distinct two-stage behavior. Initially, they converge towards a solution at a sublinear rate. Then, after a certain point, the method…
This paper considers the distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of local cost functions by using local information exchange. We first consider a distributed first-order primal-dual…
Policy gradient and actor-critic algorithms form the basis of many commonly used training techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Using these algorithms in multiagent environments poses problems such as nonstationarity and instability.…
We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…
In this paper, we propose a novel primal-dual inexact gradient projection method for nonlinear optimization problems with convex-set constraint. This method only needs inexact computation of the projections onto the convex set for each…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained attention for aligning large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The actor-only variants of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are widely applied for their…
This paper studies a novel algorithm for nonconvex composite minimization which can be interpreted in terms of dual space nonlinear preconditioning for the classical proximal gradient method. The proposed scheme can be applied to additive…
This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
Motivated by policy gradient methods in the context of reinforcement learning, we identify a large deviation rate function for the iterates generated by stochastic gradient descent for possibly non-convex objectives satisfying a…
Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…
In this work, we approach the minimization of a continuously differentiable convex function under linear equality constraints by a second-order dynamical system with asymptotically vanishing damping term. The system is formulated in terms…
Proximal gradient methods are a popular tool for the solution of structured, nonsmooth minimization problems. In this work, we investigate an extension of the former to general Banach spaces and provide worst-case convergence rates for,…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
This work proposes an accelerated primal-dual dynamical system for affine constrained convex optimization and presents a class of primal-dual methods with nonergodic convergence rates. In continuous level, exponential decay of a novel…
Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…
We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes…
We develop a parameterized Primal-Dual $\pi$ Learning method based on deep neural networks for Markov decision process with large state space and off-policy reinforcement learning. In contrast to the popular Q-learning and actor-critic…
Stochastic approximation techniques have been used in various contexts in data science. We propose a stochastic version of the forward-backward algorithm for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is not necessarily…
This paper studies the distributed optimization problem when the objective functions might be nondifferentiable and subject to heterogeneous set constraints. Unlike existing subgradient methods, we focus on the case when the exact…