Related papers: Fast Convergence of Softmax Policy Mirror Ascent
Driven by the empirical success and wide use of deep neural networks, understanding the generalization performance of overparameterized models has become an increasingly popular question. To this end, there has been substantial effort to…
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as an efficient alternative to autoregressive models due to their ability to decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, aligning dLLMs with human preferences or task-specific rewards…
Proximal gradient algorithms (PGA), while foundational for inverse problems like image reconstruction, often yield unstable convergence and suboptimal solutions by violating the critical non-negativity constraint. We identify the gradient…
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…
Policy gradient methods are notorious for having a large variance and high sample complexity. To mitigate this, we introduce SoftTreeMax -- a generalization of softmax that employs planning. In SoftTreeMax, we extend the traditional logits…
This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…
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…
Stochastic multi-objective optimization (SMOO) has recently emerged as a powerful framework for addressing machine learning problems with multiple objectives. The bias introduced by the nonlinearity of the subproblem solution mapping…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm PPG (Proximal Policy Gradient), which is close to both VPG (vanilla policy gradient) and PPO (proximal policy optimization). The PPG objective is a partial variation of the VPG objective and the…
The reinforcement learning algorithm SARSA combined with linear function approximation has been shown to converge for infinite horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs). In this paper, we investigate the convergence of the…
We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…
Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…
Policy Dual Averaging (PDA) offers a principled Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) framework that more naturally admits value function approximation than standard PMD, enabling the use of approximate advantage (or Q-) functions while retaining…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) provide a promising framework for computing reliable policies in the face of model errors. Many successful reinforcement learning algorithms build on variations of policy-gradient methods, but…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…
Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…
Tremendous progress has been made in reinforcement learning (RL) over the past decade. Most of these advancements came through the continual development of new algorithms, which were designed using a combination of mathematical derivations,…
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…