Related papers: Last-Iterate Convergent Policy Gradient Primal-Dua…
We consider the problem of solving robust Markov decision process (MDP), which involves a set of discounted, finite state, finite action space MDPs with uncertain transition kernels. The goal of planning is to find a robust policy that…
The softmax policy gradient (PG) method, which performs gradient ascent under softmax policy parameterization, is arguably one of the de facto implementations of policy optimization in modern reinforcement learning. For $\gamma$-discounted…
Primal-dual gradient dynamics that find saddle points of a Lagrangian have been widely employed for handling constrained optimization problems. Building on existing methods, we extend the augmented primal-dual gradient dynamics (Aug-PDGD)…
We present a novel accelerated primal-dual (APD) method for solving a class of deterministic and stochastic saddle point problems (SPP). The basic idea of this algorithm is to incorporate a multi-step acceleration scheme into the…
A new stochastic primal--dual algorithm for solving a composite optimization problem is proposed. It is assumed that all the functions/operators that enter the optimization problem are given as statistical expectations. These expectations…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems,…
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…
This paper proposes a novel first-order algorithm that solves composite nonsmooth and stochastic convex optimization problem with function constraints. Most of the works in the literature provide convergence rate guarantees on the…
The present work extends the randomized shortest-paths framework (RSP), interpolating between shortest-path and random-walk routing in a network, in three directions. First, it shows how to deal with equality constraints on a subset of…
In this paper, we adapt proximal incremental aggregated gradient methods to saddle point problems, which is motivated by decoupling linear transformations in regularized empirical risk minimization models. First, the Primal-Dual Proximal…
A novel Policy Gradient (PG) algorithm, called $\textit{Matryoshka Policy Gradient}$ (MPG), is introduced and studied, in the context of fixed-horizon max-entropy reinforcement learning, where an agent aims at maximizing entropy bonuses…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…
We study deterministic and stochastic primal-dual sub-gradient algorithms for distributed optimization of a separable objective function with global inequality constraints. In both algorithms, the norm of the Lagrangian multipliers are…
Online safe reinforcement learning (RL) plays a key role in dynamic environments, with applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and cybersecurity. The objective is to learn optimal policies that maximize rewards while satisfying safety…
In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…
With the advancement of autonomous driving, ensuring safety during motion planning and navigation is becoming more and more important. However, most end-to-end planning methods suffer from a lack of safety. This research addresses the…
Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…
The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…
In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…
Offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to constraints on expected cumulative cost using an existing dataset. In this paper, we propose Primal-Dual-Critic…