Related papers: Convergence of Policy Mirror Descent Beyond Compat…
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…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…
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…
In this paper, we present a new policy gradient (PG) methods, namely the block policy mirror descent (BPMD) method for solving a class of regularized reinforcement learning (RL) problems with (strongly)-convex regularizers. Compared to the…
In this paper, we examine the convergence of mirror descent in a class of stochastic optimization problems that are not necessarily convex (or even quasi-convex), and which we call variationally coherent. Since the standard technique of…
Proximal policy optimization and trust region policy optimization (PPO and TRPO) with actor and critic parametrized by neural networks achieve significant empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, due to nonconvexity, the…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…
Based on the ideas of arXiv:1710.06612, we consider the problem of minimization of the Holder-continuous non-smooth functional $f$ with non-positive convex (generally, non-smooth) Lipschitz-continuous functional constraint. We propose some…
We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the agnostic policy learning setting, where the goal is to find a policy whose performance is competitive with the best policy in a given class of interest $\Pi$ -- crucially, without assuming that…
In this paper we consider online mirror descent (OMD) algorithms, a class of scalable online learning algorithms exploiting data geometric structures through mirror maps. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented in terms of the…
In this paper, we analyze the mirror descent algorithm for non-smooth optimization problems in which the objective function is relatively strongly convex, without relying on the standard Lipschitz continuity assumption commonly used in the…
This letter investigates the convergence and concentration properties of the Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) algorithm utilizing biased stochastic subgradients. We establish the almost sure convergence of the algorithm's iterates under the…
Explicit exploration in the action space was assumed to be indispensable for online policy gradient methods to avoid a drastic degradation in sample complexity, for solving general reinforcement learning problems over finite state and…
Policy gradient methods equipped with deep neural networks have achieved great success in solving high-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, current analyses cannot explain why they are resistant to the curse of…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
We propose Dual Approximation Policy Optimization (DAPO), a framework that incorporates general function approximation into policy mirror descent methods. In contrast to the popular approach of using the $L_2$-norm to measure function…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…