Related papers: Policy Mirror Descent with Lookahead
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…
We study computational and statistical aspects of learning Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs). In this model, the learner interacts with an MDP drawn at the beginning of each epoch from an unknown mixture of MDPs. To sidestep known…
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…
Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) has become a cornerstone of modern reinforcement learning alignment, prized for its efficacy in foregoing an explicit value-critic by leveraging reward normalization across sampled trajectory…
Distributed gradient descent algorithms have come to the fore in modern machine learning, especially in parallelizing the handling of large datasets that are distributed across several workers. However, scant attention has been paid to…
Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…
We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…
Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…
Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have underscored the potential of scaling inference-time compute through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, GRPO frequently suffers from…
Approximate Policy Iteration (API) algorithms alternate between (approximate) policy evaluation and (approximate) greedification. Many different approaches have been explored for approximate policy evaluation, but less is understood about…
It is well known that mirror descent may diverge or cycle on merely monotone variational inequalities. In this paper, we propose \emph{Target Mirror Descent} (TMD), a unified framework that stabilizes monotone flows via a target point…
We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…
Vision-based robotic cloth unfolding has made great progress recently. However, prior works predominantly rely on value learning and have not fully explored policy-based techniques. Recently, the success of reinforcement learning on the…
Policy Optimization (PO) methods are among the most popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in practice. Recently, Sherman et al. [2023a] proposed a PO-based algorithm with rate-optimal regret guarantees under the linear Markov…
Very recently proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms have been proposed as first-order optimization methods for effective reinforcement learning. While PPO is inspired by the same learning theory that justifies trust region policy…
Large-scale L1-regularized loss minimization problems arise in high-dimensional applications such as compressed sensing and high-dimensional supervised learning, including classification and regression problems. High-performance algorithms…
This paper focuses on learning a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) via general parameterized policies. We propose a Primal-Dual based Regularized Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (PDR-ANPG) algorithm that uses entropy and…
This paper presents a novel non-linear model reduction method: Probabilistic Manifold Decomposition (PMD), which provides a powerful framework for constructing non-intrusive reduced-order models (ROMs) by embedding a high-dimensional system…
This paper proposes a novel termination criterion, termed the advantage gap function, for finite state and action Markov decision processes (MDP) and reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating this advantage gap function into the design…