Related papers: Learning mirror maps in policy mirror descent
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) has emerged as a unifying framework in reinforcement learning (RL) by linking policy gradient methods with a first-order optimization method known as mirror descent. At its core, PMD incorporates two key…
Policy mirror descent (PMD) is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning, which can cover a wide range of typical policy optimization methods by specifying different mirror maps. Existing analysis of PMD requires…
This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…
Modern policy optimization methods roughly follow the policy mirror descent (PMD) algorithmic template, for which there are by now numerous theoretical convergence results. However, most of these either target tabular environments, or can…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a powerful and theoretically sound methodology for sequential decision-making. However, it is not directly applicable to Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to the inaccessibility of explicit action-value…
Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) stands as a versatile algorithmic framework encompassing several seminal policy gradient algorithms such as natural policy gradient, with connections with state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms…
We present new policy mirror descent (PMD) methods for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems with either strongly convex or general convex regularizers. By exploring the structural properties of these overall highly nonconvex…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…
Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice, typically based either on an entropy bonus or a Kullback-Leibler divergence that constrains successive policies. In practice, these…
We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…
Policy mirror descent (PMD) provides a principled framework for reinforcement learning (RL) by iteratively solving KL-regularized policy improvement subproblems. While this approach has been adopted in training advanced LLMs such as Kimi…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) is a common policy optimization algorithm and can be viewed as mirror ascent in the space of probabilities. Recently, Vaswani et al. [2021] introduced a policy gradient method that corresponds to mirror ascent…
Mirror descent (MD), a well-known first-order method in constrained convex optimization, has recently been shown as an important tool to analyze trust-region algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). However, there remains a considerable…
Modern policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning, such as TRPO and PPO, owe their success to the use of parameterized policies. However, while theoretical guarantees have been established for this class of algorithms, especially…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…
We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…
While there is an extensive body of research analyzing policy gradient methods for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on policy gradient methods for average-reward MDPs has been limited, with most existing results restricted to…