English
Related papers

Related papers: Quasi-Newton Iteration in Deterministic Policy Gra…

200 papers

Optimization is important in machine learning problems, and quasi-Newton methods have a reputation as the most efficient numerical schemes for smooth unconstrained optimization. In this paper, we consider the explicit superlinear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-13 Dachao Lin , Haishan Ye , Zhihua Zhang

In this paper, we study greedy variants of quasi-Newton methods. They are based on the updating formulas from a certain subclass of the Broyden family. In particular, this subclass includes the well-known DFP, BFGS and SR1 updates. However,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-02 Anton Rodomanov , Yurii Nesterov

In this paper, we propose a distributed second- order method for reinforcement learning. Our approach is the fastest in literature so-far as it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including ADMM, by significant margins. We achieve this by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-08 Rasul Tutunov , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Ali Jadbabaie

Four decades after their invention, quasi-Newton methods are still state of the art in unconstrained numerical optimization. Although not usually interpreted thus, these are learning algorithms that fit a local quadratic approximation to…

Numerical Analysis · Computer Science 2012-06-22 Philipp Hennig , Martin Kiefel

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

In modern robotics, effectively computing optimal control policies under dynamically varying environments poses substantial challenges to the off-the-shelf parametric policy gradient methods, such as the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Apan Dastider , Mingjie Lin

Second-order methods for neural network optimization have several advantages over methods based on first-order gradient descent, including better scaling to large mini-batch sizes and fewer updates needed for convergence. But they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-21 Huishuai Zhang , Caiming Xiong , James Bradbury , Richard Socher

This report investigates the fitting of the Hessian or its inverse for stochastic optimizations using a Hessian fitting criterion derived from the preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD) method. This criterion is closely related…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Xi-Lin Li

We propose projection-free sequential algorithms for linear-quadratic dynamics games. These policy gradient based algorithms are akin to Stackelberg leadership model and can be extended to model-free settings. We show that if the leader…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-11-13 Jingjing Bu , Lillian J. Ratliff , Mehran Mesbahi

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

We test the performance of deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, able to handle continuous state and action spaces, to learn Nash equilibria in a setting where firms compete in prices. These…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Christoph Graf , Viktor Zobernig , Johannes Schmidt , Claude Klöckl

This paper proposes a nonmonotone proximal quasi-Newton algorithm for unconstrained convex multiobjective composite optimization problems. To design the search direction, we minimize the max-scalarization of the variations of the Hessian…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-04 Xiaoxue Jiang

In this paper, we present a policy gradient method that avoids exploratory noise injection and performs policy search over the deterministic landscape. By avoiding noise injection all sources of estimation variance can be eliminated in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Ehsan Saleh , Saba Ghaffari , Timothy Bretl , Matthew West

We introduce the first direct policy search algorithm which provably converges to the globally optimal $\textit{dynamic}$ filter for the classical problem of predicting the outputs of a linear dynamical system, given noisy, partial…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Jack Umenberger , Max Simchowitz , Juan C. Perdomo , Kaiqing Zhang , Russ Tedrake

We consider the finite-sum optimization problem, where each component function is strongly convex and has Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian. The recently proposed incremental quasi-Newton method is based on BFGS update and achieves…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Bilevel optimization has arisen as a powerful tool in modern machine learning. However, due to the nested structure of bilevel optimization, even gradient-based methods require second-order derivative approximations via Jacobian- or/and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Daouda Sow , Kaiyi Ji , Yingbin Liang

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

We consider a general-sum N-player linear-quadratic game with stochastic dynamics over a finite horizon and prove the global convergence of the natural policy gradient method to the Nash equilibrium. In order to prove the convergence of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-16 Ben Hambly , Renyuan Xu , Huining Yang