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We adapt recent tools developed for the analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in non-convex optimization to obtain convergence and sample complexity guarantees for the vanilla policy gradient (PG). Our only assumptions are that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Rui Yuan , Robert M. Gower , Alessandro Lazaric

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Siddhant Agarwal , Ishan Durugkar , Peter Stone , Amy Zhang

We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Anas Barakat , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods for finding optimal policies in linear quadratic (LQ) mean field control (MFC) problems over an infinite horizon in continuous time, with common noise and entropy regularization. We study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-06 Noufel Frikha , Huyên Pham , Xuanye Song

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Mizhaan Prajit Maniyar , Akash Mondal , Prashanth L. A. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study a Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) problem with constraint heterogeneity. In our setting, we aim to solve a reinforcement learning problem with multiple constraints while $N$ training agents are located in $N$ different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Hao Jin , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved significant breakthroughs in various tasks. However, most DRL algorithms suffer a problem of generalizing the learned policy which makes the learning performance largely affected even by minor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Zhengyao Jiang , Shan Luo

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

We study the setting of \emph{performative reinforcement learning} where the deployed policy affects both the reward, and the transition of the underlying Markov decision process. Prior work~\parencite{MTR23} has addressed this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

In the pursuit of finding an optimal policy, reinforcement learning (RL) methods generally ignore the properties of learned policies apart from their expected return. Thus, even when successful, it is difficult to characterize which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yash Jhaveri , Harley Wiltzer , Patrick Shafto , Marc G. Bellemare , David Meger

We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Ming Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

Recent work shows that preference alignment objectives can be interpreted as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) & unaligned (less-preferred) distributions, yielding a principled recipe for designing alignment losses. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rajdeep Haldar , Lantao Mei , Guang Lin , Yue Xing , Qifan Song

Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) allows multiple agents to collaboratively build a decision making policy without sharing raw trajectories. However, if a small fraction of these agents are adversarial, it can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Swetha Ganesh , Jiayu Chen , Gugan Thoppe , Vaneet Aggarwal

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou
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