Related papers: A Novel Framework for Policy Mirror Descent with G…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its strong empirical performance, yet it lacks formal guarantees for policy improvement and convergence. PPO's clipped surrogate objective is motivated by a…
Dynamic Programming (DP) provides standard algorithms to solve Markov Decision Processes. However, these algorithms generally do not optimize a scalar objective function. In this paper, we draw connections between DP and (constrained)…
Generalization is a central problem in Machine Learning. Most prediction methods require careful calibration of hyperparameters carried out on a hold-out \textit{validation} dataset to achieve generalization. The main goal of this paper is…
In the paper, we design a novel Bregman gradient policy optimization framework for reinforcement learning based on Bregman divergences and momentum techniques. Specifically, we propose a Bregman gradient policy optimization (BGPO) algorithm…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms can be seen as versions of approximate policy iteration (API). While standard API often performs poorly, it has been shown that learning can be stabilized by regularizing each policy update by the…
Policy optimization algorithms are crucial in many fields but challenging to grasp and implement, often due to complex calculations related to Markov decision processes and varying use of discount and average reward setups. This paper…
Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…
Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…
First-order optimization methods tend to inherently favor certain solutions over others when minimizing an underdetermined training objective that has multiple global optima. This phenomenon, known as implicit bias, plays a critical role in…
The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method used to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), has proved its effectiveness in practical applications such as DeepSeek-R1. It raises a question whether GRPO can…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…
We apply functional acceleration to the Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) general family of algorithms, which cover a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Leveraging duality, we propose a momentum-based PMD…
We investigate different randomizations for mirror descent method. We try to propose such a randomization that allows us to use sparsity of the problem as much as it possible. In the paper one can also find a generalization of randomizaed…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…
This paper explores a new framework for reinforcement learning based on online convex optimization, in particular mirror descent and related algorithms. Mirror descent can be viewed as an enhanced gradient method, particularly suited to…
We present a unified framework based on primal-dual stochastic mirror descent for approximately solving infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) given a generative model. When applied to an average-reward MDP with $A_{tot}$ total…
The recent remarkable progress of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) stands on regularization of policy for stable and efficient learning. A popular method, named proximal policy optimization (PPO), has been introduced for this purpose. PPO…
We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…