Related papers: Elementary Analysis of Policy Gradient Methods
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…
We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…
We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…
While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…
Multi-agent interactions are increasingly important in the context of reinforcement learning, and the theoretical foundations of policy gradient methods have attracted surging research interest. We investigate the global convergence of…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a general class of policy mirror descent methods, all with…
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…
Policy gradient methods are known to be highly sensitive to the choice of policy parameterization. In particular, the widely used softmax parameterization can induce ill-conditioned optimization landscapes and lead to exponentially slow…
We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…
Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…
Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…
We study the global convergence of policy gradient for infinite-horizon entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces. We consider log-linear softmax policies with linear function…
In this paper, we study the global convergence of model-based and model-free policy gradient descent and natural policy gradient descent algorithms for linear quadratic deep structured teams. In such systems, agents are partitioned into a…
Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…
We provide global convergence rates for vanilla and entropy-regularized federated softmax stochastic policy gradient (FedPG) with local training. We show that FedPG converges to a near-optimal policy in terms of the average agent value,…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…