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Factorization-based gradient descent is a scalable and efficient algorithm for solving low-rank matrix completion. Recent progress in structured non-convex optimization has offered global convergence guarantees for gradient descent under…
With the outstanding performance of policy gradient (PG) method in the reinforcement learning field, the convergence theory of it has aroused more and more interest recently. Meanwhile, the significant importance and abundant theoretical…
System stabilization via policy gradient (PG) methods has drawn increasing attention in both control and machine learning communities. In this paper, we study their convergence and sample complexity for stabilizing linear time-invariant…
In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…
Policy gradient methods with actor-critic schemes demonstrate tremendous empirical successes, especially when the actors and critics are parameterized by neural networks. However, it remains less clear whether such "neural" policy gradient…
Policy gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms coupled with neural networks have shown success in learning complex policies in the model free continuous action space control setting. However, explicitly parameterized policies are…
Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…
Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…
In this paper, we investigate a model-free optimal control design that minimizes an infinite horizon average expected quadratic cost of states and control actions subject to a probabilistic risk or chance constraint using input-output data.…
We study the global convergence of a Fisher-Rao policy gradient flow for infinite-horizon entropy-regularised Markov decision processes with Polish state and action space. The flow is a continuous-time analogue of a policy mirror descent…
We study the convergence of off-policy TD(0) with linear function approximation when used to approximate the expected discounted reward in a Markov chain. It is well known that the combination of off-policy learning and function…
We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…
We consider policy gradient algorithms for the indefinite least squares stationary optimal control, e.g., linear-quadratic-regulator (LQR) with indefinite state and input penalization matrices. Such a setup has important applications in…
We propose a new policy gradient method, named homotopic policy mirror descent (HPMD), for solving discounted, infinite horizon MDPs with finite state and action spaces. HPMD performs a mirror descent type policy update with an additional…
The recently proposed option-critic architecture Bacon et al. provide a stochastic policy gradient approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning. Specifically, they provide a way to estimate the gradient of the expected discounted return…
We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…
We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving…
The reinforcement learning algorithm SARSA combined with linear function approximation has been shown to converge for infinite horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs). In this paper, we investigate the convergence of the…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…