Related papers: Policy Mirror Descent Inherently Explores Action S…
We propose two policy gradient algorithms for solving the problem of control in an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) context. Both algorithms incorporate a smoothed functional (SF) based gradient estimation scheme. The first algorithm…
We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…
In this paper we consider the problem of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP). Given an MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, the discount factor $\gamma \in (0,1)$, and an approximation threshold…
Consider the problem of approximating the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP) by sampling state transitions. In contrast to existing reinforcement learning methods that are based on successive approximations to the nonlinear…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable successes on a range of continuous control tasks due to its high sample efficiency. To save the computation cost of conducting planning online, recent practices tend to…
We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…
Off-policy reinforcement learning enables near-optimal policy from suboptimal experience, thereby provisions opportunity for artificial intelligence applications in healthcare. Previous works have mainly framed patient-clinician…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of off-policy policy improvement algorithms with state-action density ratio correction under function approximation setting, where the objective function is formulated as a max-max-min…
Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform…
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…
On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to…
Mirror Descent is a popular algorithm, that extends Gradients Descent (GD) beyond the Euclidean geometry. One of its benefits is to enable strong convergence guarantees through smooth-like analyses, even for objectives with exploding or…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
We study Concave Constrained Markov Decision Processes (Concave CMDPs) where both the objective and constraints are defined as concave functions of the state-action occupancy measure. We propose the Variance-Reduced Primal-Dual Policy…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…
Exploration is a major challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for high-dimensional domains that require function approximation. We propose exploration objectives -- policy optimization objectives that enable downstream maximization…
Temporal-difference learning with gradient correction (TDC) is a two time-scale algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. This algorithm was initially proposed with linear function approximation, and was later extended to…
We consider infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted (linear) constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) where the objective is to find a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to expected cumulative constraints. Given…
We introduce a new family of particle evolution samplers suitable for constrained domains and non-Euclidean geometries. Stein Variational Mirror Descent and Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Descent minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…