Related papers: Enhancing Policy Gradient with the Polyak Step-Siz…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated promising results on complex tasks, yet often require impractical numbers of samples since they learn from scratch. Meta-RL aims to address this challenge by leveraging experience…
We consider the problem of control in the setting of reinforcement learning (RL), where model information is not available. Policy gradient algorithms are a popular solution approach for this problem and are usually shown to converge to a…
Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) is one of the prevalently studied subcategories of trial-and-error-based methods with the intention to be deployed on real-world systems. In safe RL, the goal is to maximize reward performance while…
We propose and analyze a variant of Sparse Polyak for high dimensional M-estimation problems. Sparse Polyak proposes a novel adaptive step-size rule tailored to suitably estimate the problem's curvature in the high-dimensional setting,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…
Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) holds the promise of automating the acquisition of complex controllers that can map sensory inputs directly to low-level actions. In the domain of robotic locomotion, deep RL could enable learning…
We propose KFCPO, a novel Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) algorithm that combines scalable Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC) based second-order policy optimization with safety-aware gradient manipulation. KFCPO…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck. To address this critical yet challenging issue, we present a…
Despite ample motivation from costly exploration and limited trajectory data, rapidly adapting to new environments with few-shot reinforcement learning (RL) can remain a challenging task, especially with respect to personalized settings.…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents can learn an effective policy directly from repeated interactions with a black-box environment. However in practice, the algorithms often require large amounts of training experience to…
Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…
Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
Natural gradients have long been studied in deep reinforcement learning due to their fast convergence properties and covariant weight updates. However, computing natural gradients requires inversion of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) at…
In smooth strongly convex optimization, knowledge of the strong convexity parameter is critical for obtaining simple methods with accelerated rates. In this work, we study a class of methods, based on Polyak steps, where this knowledge is…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…
Approaches to policy optimization have been motivated from diverse principles, based on how the parametric model is interpreted (e.g. value versus policy representation) or how the learning objective is formulated, yet they share a common…
We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular…
Safety is the priority concern when applying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to real-world control problems. While policy iteration provides a fundamental algorithm for standard RL, an analogous theoretical algorithm for safe RL…