Related papers: Towards Principled, Practical Policy Gradient for …

We propose a novel combinatorial stochastic-greedy bandit (SGB) algorithm for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems when no extra information other than the joint reward of the selected set of $n$ arms at each time step $t\in [T]$ is…

We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…

We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…

This paper discusses theoretical and experimental aspects of gradient-based approaches to the direct optimization of policy performance in controlled POMDPs. We introduce GPOMDP, a REINFORCE-like algorithm for estimating an approximation to…

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is a popular class of algorithms for scalable Bayesian inference. However, these algorithms include hyperparameters such as step size or batch size that influence the accuracy of…

We present a methodology to deploy the stochastic policy gradient method, using actor-critic techniques, when the optimal policy is approximated using a parametric optimization problem, allowing one to enforce safety via hard constraints.…

We study robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) with general policy parameterization under s-rectangular and non-rectangular uncertainty sets. Prior work is largely limited to tabular policies, and hence either lacks sample complexity…

Multi-dueling bandits, where a learner selects $m \geq 2$ arms per round and observes only the winner, arise naturally in many applications including ranking and recommendation systems, yet a fundamental question has remained open: can a…

The objective of canonical multi-armed bandits is to identify and repeatedly select an arm with the largest reward, often in the form of the expected value of the arm's probability distribution. Such a utilitarian perspective and focus on…

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Stochastic gradient methods for minimizing nonconvex composite objective functions typically rely on the Lipschitz smoothness of the differentiable part, but this assumption fails in many important problem classes like quadratic inverse…

While standard reinforcement learning optimizes a single reward signal, many applications require optimizing a nonlinear utility $f(J_1^\pi,\dots,J_M^\pi)$ over multiple objectives, where each $J_m^\pi$ denotes the expected discounted…

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

In this paper, we propose an efficient implementation of deep policy gradient method (PGM) for optimal control problems in continuous time. The proposed method has the ability to manage the allocation of computational resources, number of…

Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…

We consider distributed optimization over networks where each agent is associated with a smooth and strongly convex local objective function. We assume that the agents only have access to unbiased estimators of the gradient of their…

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Projected policy gradient (PPG) is a basic policy optimization method in reinforcement learning. Given access to exact policy evaluations, previous studies have established the sublinear convergence of PPG for sufficiently small step sizes…

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…