English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy Mirror Descent with Lookahead

200 papers

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-23 Emmeran Johnson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Patrick Rebeschini

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wenye Li , Hongxu Chen , Jiacai Liu , Ke Wei

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Jiacai Liu , Wenye Li , Ke Wei

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 $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Tao Liu , Ruida Zhou , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jan Felix Kleuker , Aske Plaat , Thomas Moerland

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Qiuhao Wang , Shaohang Xu , Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Manan Tomar , Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a popular framework in reinforcement learning, serving as a unifying perspective that encompasses numerous algorithms. These algorithms are derived through the selection of a mirror map and enjoy finite-time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-07 Carlo Alfano , Sebastian Towers , Silvia Sapora , Chris Lu , Patrick Rebeschini

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Alena Shilova , Alex Davey , Brahim Driss , Riad Akrour

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Wenhao Zhan , Shicong Cen , Baihe Huang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Yuejie Chi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Guanghui Lan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Pietro Novelli , Marco Pratticò , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Veronica Chelu , Doina Precup

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Zhenghao Xu , Qin Lu , Changlong Yu , Tuo Zhao

In this paper, we present a new policy gradient (PG) methods, namely the block policy mirror descent (BPMD) method for solving a class of regularized reinforcement learning (RL) problems with (strongly)-convex regularizers. Compared to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Guanghui Lan , Yan Li , Tuo Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

Diffusion policies have achieved great success in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their strong expressive capacity. However, the inference of diffusion policy models relies on a slow iterative sampling process, which limits their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Tianyi Chen , Haitong Ma , Na Li , Kai Wang , Bo Dai
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›