Related papers: Wasserstein Policy Optimization
We describe an iterative procedure for optimizing policies, with guaranteed monotonic improvement. By making several approximations to the theoretically-justified procedure, we develop a practical algorithm, called Trust Region Policy…
Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) aims to find robust and generalizable solutions by hedging against data perturbations in Wasserstein distance. Despite its recent empirical success in operations research and machine…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…
Interest in derivative-free optimization (DFO) and "evolutionary strategies" (ES) has recently surged in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) community, with growing evidence that they can match state of the art methods for policy optimization…
Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has enabled to prove the equivalence between robustness and regularization in classification and regression, thus providing an analytical reason why regularization generalizes well in statistical…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as a promising alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, empirical evaluations consistently reveal suboptimal…
Uncertainty estimation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical component in control tasks where agents must balance safe exploration and efficient learning. While deep neural networks have enabled breakthroughs in RL, they often lack…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular state-of-the-art on-policy algorithms that has become a standard baseline in modern reinforcement learning with applications in numerous fields. Though it delivers stable…
Wasserstein Discriminant Analysis (WDA) is a new supervised method that can improve classification of high-dimensional data by computing a suitable linear map onto a lower dimensional subspace. Following the blueprint of classical Linear…
Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…
We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…
Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (WDRO) strengthens statistical learning under model uncertainty by minimizing the local worst-case risk within a prescribed ambiguity set. Although WDRO has been extensively studied in…
We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…
We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…
We consider a Continual Reinforcement Learning setup, where a learning agent must continuously adapt to new tasks while retaining previously acquired skill sets, with a focus on the challenge of avoiding forgetting past gathered knowledge…
Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…
Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. This paper proposes $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ algorithm: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent. In $\mathtt{VRMPO}$, a novel…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown promise in discrete action spaces by eliminating value function dependencies through group-based advantage estimation. However, its application to continuous control remains unexplored,…
Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…
Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…