Related papers: Achieve Performatively Optimal Policy for Performa…
Projection-free optimization via different variants of the Frank-Wolfe (FW), a.k.a. Conditional Gradient method has become one of the cornerstones in optimization for machine learning since in many cases the linear minimization oracle is…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its strong empirical performance, yet it lacks formal guarantees for policy improvement and convergence. PPO's clipped surrogate objective is motivated by a…
The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…
The goal of reinforcement learning is estimating a policy that maps states to actions and maximizes the cumulative reward of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). This is oftentimes achieved by estimating first the optimal (reward) value…
The Frank-Wolfe (FW) method is a popular approach for solving optimization problems with structured constraints that arise in machine learning applications. In recent years, stochastic versions of FW have gained popularity, motivated by…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the setting of continuous time and space, for an infinite horizon with a discounted objective and the underlying dynamics driven by a stochastic differential equation. Built upon recent advances in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…
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…
We revisit the Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization under strongly convex constraint sets. We provide a faster convergence rate for FW without line search, showing that a previously overlooked variant of FW is indeed faster than the standard…
We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…
We study a phase retrieval problem in the Poisson noise model. Motivated by the PhaseLift approach, we approximate the maximum-likelihood estimator by solving a convex program with a nuclear norm constraint. While the Frank-Wolfe algorithm,…
We propose Frank--Wolfe (FW) algorithms with an adaptive Bregman step-size strategy for smooth adaptable (also called: relatively smooth) (weakly-) convex functions. This means that the gradient of the objective function is not necessarily…
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…
This paper presents a subgradient-based algorithm for constrained nonsmooth convex optimization that does not require projections onto the feasible set. While the well-established Frank-Wolfe algorithm and its variants already avoid…
While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…
Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…
In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…
We introduce Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO), an actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. WPO can be derived as an approximation to Wasserstein gradient flow over the space of all policies…
Reward-Weighted Regression (RWR) belongs to a family of widely known iterative Reinforcement Learning algorithms based on the Expectation-Maximization framework. In this family, learning at each iteration consists of sampling a batch of…