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Policy gradient methods ignore the potential value of adjusting environment variables: unobservable state features that are randomly determined by the environment in a physical setting, but are controllable in a simulator. This can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Supratik Paul , Michael A. Osborne , Shimon Whiteson

Frank-Wolfe algorithm (FW) and its variants have gained a surge of interests in machine learning community due to its projection-free property. Recently people have reduced the gradient evaluation complexity of FW algorithm to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Yan Li , Chao Qu , Huan Xu

Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Debabrota Basu , Udvas Das , Brahim Driss , Uddalak Mukherjee

Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Ted Moskovitz , Michael Arbel , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano

We consider the applications of the Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm for Apprenticeship Learning (AL). In this setting, we are given a Markov Decision Process (MDP) without an explicit reward function. Instead, we observe an expert that acts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Zahavy , Alon Cohen , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour

We prove that the block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe (BCFW) algorithm converges with state-of-the-art rates in both convex and nonconvex settings under a very mild "block-iterative" assumption. This appears to be the first result on BCFW…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Gábor Braun , Jannis Halbey , Sebastian Pokutta , Zev Woodstock

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

We introduce a new projection-free (Frank-Wolfe) method for optimizing structured nonconvex functions that are expressed as a difference of two convex functions. This problem class subsumes smooth nonconvex minimization, positioning our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-01 Hoomaan Maskan , Yikun Hou , Suvrit Sra , Alp Yurtsever

In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

Decentralized optimization algorithms have received much attention due to the recent advances in network information processing. However, conventional decentralized algorithms based on projected gradient descent are incapable of handling…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-29 Hoi-To Wai , Jean Lafond , Anna Scaglione , Eric Moulines

Reward inference (learning a reward model from human preferences) is a critical intermediate step in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, RLHF faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

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

Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Francesco Faccio , Aditya Ramesh , Vincent Herrmann , Jean Harb , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Policy gradient (PG) algorithms have been widely used in reinforcement learning (RL). However, PG algorithms rely on exploiting the value function being learned with the first-order update locally, which results in limited sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Hao Sun , Ziping Xu , Yuhang Song , Meng Fang , Jiechao Xiong , Bo Dai , Bolei Zhou

The boosted Frank-Wolfe algorithm accelerates the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm by better aligning the update direction with the negative gradient. Its analysis, however, has been limited to deterministic convex problems, with step sizes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Navil Nandhan , Abbas Khademi , Antonio Silveti-Falls

The Frank-Wolfe algorithm is a classic method for constrained optimization problems. It has recently been popular in many machine learning applications because its projection-free property leads to more efficient iterations. In this paper,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-23 Cheng Chen , Luo Luo , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

Reinforcement learning is a general technique that allows an agent to learn an optimal policy and interact with an environment in sequential decision making problems. The goodness of a policy is measured by its value function starting from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-30 C. Shi , S. Zhang , W. Lu , R. Song

In this paper, we consider the general non-oblivious stochastic optimization where the underlying stochasticity may change during the optimization procedure and depends on the point at which the function is evaluated. We develop Stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-10 Hamed Hassani , Amin Karbasi , Aryan Mokhtari , Zebang Shen

One of the beauties of the projected gradient descent method lies in its rather simple mechanism and yet stable behavior with inexact, stochastic gradients, which has led to its wide-spread use in many machine learning applications.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-11 Mingrui Zhang , Zebang Shen , Aryan Mokhtari , Hamed Hassani , Amin Karbasi