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Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Recent theory suggests that reward-model-first methods can be more sample-efficient than direct policy fitting when the reward function is statistically simpler than the induced policy. We propose DDO-RM, a finite-candidate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-01 Tiantian Zhang , Jierui Zuo , Michael Chen , Wenping Wang

We study the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) with an average-reward criterion. The goal is to recover an unknown policy and a reward function when the agent only has samples of states and actions from an experienced agent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Feiyang Wu , Jingyang Ke , Anqi Wu

Temporal Difference (TD) algorithms are widely used in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their performance is heavily influenced by the size of the neural network. While in supervised learning, the regime of over-parameterization and its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 David Brellmann , Eloïse Berthier , David Filliat , Goran Frehse

As with any machine learning problem with limited data, effective offline RL algorithms require careful regularization to avoid overfitting. One-step methods perform regularization by doing just a single step of policy improvement, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Benjamin Eysenbach , Matthieu Geist , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In this paper, we argue that mutual distillation between reinforcement learning policies serves as an implicit regularization, preventing them from overfitting to irrelevant features. We highlight two separate contributions: (i)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Zhengpeng Xie , Jiahang Cao , Changwei Wang , Fan Yang , Marco Hutter , Qiang Zhang , Jianxiong Zhang , Renjing Xu

The stochastic mirror descent (SMD) algorithm is a general class of training algorithms, which includes the celebrated stochastic gradient descent (SGD), as a special case. It utilizes a mirror potential to influence the implicit bias of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Taylan Kargin , Fariborz Salehi , Babak Hassibi

Mirror Descent (MD) is a scalable first-order method widely used in large-scale optimization, with applications in image processing, policy optimization, and neural network training. This paper generalizes MD to optimization on Riemannian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-19 Jiaxin Jiang , Lei Shi , Jiyuan Tan

This paper explores a new framework for reinforcement learning based on online convex optimization, in particular mirror descent and related algorithms. Mirror descent can be viewed as an enhanced gradient method, particularly suited to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sridhar Mahadevan , Bo Liu

We provide theoretical guarantees for convergence of discrete-time policy mirror descent with inexact advantage functions updated using temporal difference (TD) learning for entropy regularised MDPs in Polish state and action spaces. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Denis Zorba , David Šiška , Lukasz Szpruch

This paper examines reinforcement learning (RL) in infinite-horizon decision processes with almost-sure safety constraints, crucial for applications like autonomous systems, finance, and resource management. We propose a doubly-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Pekka Malo , Lauri Viitasaari , Antti Suominen , Eeva Vilkkumaa , Olli Tahvonen

Online learning algorithms are fast, memory-efficient, easy to implement, and applicable to many prediction problems, including classification, regression, and ranking. Several online algorithms were proposed in the past few decades, some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-03 Francesco Orabona , Koby Crammer , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We focus on parameterized policy search for reinforcement learning over continuous action spaces. Typically, one assumes the score function associated with a policy is bounded, which fails to hold even for Gaussian policies. To properly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Amrit Singh Bedi , Souradip Chakraborty , Anjaly Parayil , Brian Sadler , Pratap Tokekar , Alec Koppel

In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Reazul Hasan Russel , Mouhacine Benosman , Jeroen Van Baar

Markov Potential Games (MPGs) form an important sub-class of Markov games, which are a common framework to model multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. In particular, MPGs include as a special case the identical-interest setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Pragnya Alatur , Anas Barakat , Niao He

Online mirror descent (OMD) and dual averaging (DA) -- two fundamental algorithms for online convex optimization -- are known to have very similar (and sometimes identical) performance guarantees when used with a fixed learning rate. Under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Huang Fang , Nicholas J. A. Harvey , Victor S. Portella , Michael P. Friedlander

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

Diffusion policies have achieved superior performance in imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their rich expressiveness. However, the conventional diffusion training procedure requires samples from target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Haitong Ma , Tianyi Chen , Kai Wang , Na Li , Bo Dai

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu