Related papers: Some remarks on gradient dominance and LQR policy …
Recent years have seen considerable progress in the continual training of deep neural networks, predominantly thanks to approaches that add replay or regularization terms to the loss function to approximate the joint loss over all tasks so…
Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…
Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…
This paper considers the class of deterministic continuous-time optimal control problems (OCPs) with piecewise-affine (PWA) vector field, polynomial Lagrangian and semialgebraic input and state constraints. The OCP is first relaxed as an…
Recent work across many machine learning disciplines has highlighted that standard descent methods, even without explicit regularization, do not merely minimize the training error, but also exhibit an implicit bias. This bias is typically…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…
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…
Reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) is a dominant paradigm for improving pretrained policies for downstream tasks. These pretrained policies, trained on large datasets, produce generations with a broad range of promising but unrefined…
This paper proposes and analyzes two new policy learning methods: regularized policy gradient (RPG) and iterative policy optimization (IPO), for a class of discounted linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems over an infinite time horizon…
We prove non-asymptotic error bounds for particle gradient descent (PGD, Kuntz et al., 2023), a recently introduced algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of large latent variable models obtained by discretizing a gradient flow of the…
We prove convergence of the proximal policy gradient method for a class of constrained stochastic control problems with control in both the drift and diffusion of the state process. The problem requires either the running or terminal cost…
This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with recent innovations such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) demonstrating exceptional…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…
Proximal gradient methods are a popular tool for the solution of structured, nonsmooth minimization problems. In this work, we investigate an extension of the former to general Banach spaces and provide worst-case convergence rates for,…