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Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) has emerged as a unifying framework in reinforcement learning (RL) by linking policy gradient methods with a first-order optimization method known as mirror descent. At its core, PMD incorporates two key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jan Felix Kleuker , Aske Plaat , Thomas Moerland

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice, typically based either on an entropy bonus or a Kullback-Leibler divergence that constrains successive policies. In practice, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Alena Shilova , Alex Davey , Brahim Driss , Riad Akrour

We present new policy mirror descent (PMD) methods for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems with either strongly convex or general convex regularizers. By exploring the structural properties of these overall highly nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Guanghui Lan

Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Wenhao Zhan , Shicong Cen , Baihe Huang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Yuejie Chi

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-23 Emmeran Johnson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Patrick Rebeschini

This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wenye Li , Hongxu Chen , Jiacai Liu , Ke Wei

Policy mirror descent (PMD) is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning, which can cover a wide range of typical policy optimization methods by specifying different mirror maps. Existing analysis of PMD requires…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Jiacai Liu , Wenye Li , Ke Wei

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a popular framework in reinforcement learning, serving as a unifying perspective that encompasses numerous algorithms. These algorithms are derived through the selection of a mirror map and enjoy finite-time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-07 Carlo Alfano , Sebastian Towers , Silvia Sapora , Chris Lu , Patrick Rebeschini

We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Tao Liu , Ruida Zhou , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Modern policy optimization methods roughly follow the policy mirror descent (PMD) algorithmic template, for which there are by now numerous theoretical convergence results. However, most of these either target tabular environments, or can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a powerful and theoretically sound methodology for sequential decision-making. However, it is not directly applicable to Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to the inaccessibility of explicit action-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Pietro Novelli , Marco Pratticò , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) stands as a versatile algorithmic framework encompassing several seminal policy gradient algorithms such as natural policy gradient, with connections with state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Kimon Protopapas , Anas Barakat

Mirror descent (MD), a well-known first-order method in constrained convex optimization, has recently been shown as an important tool to analyze trust-region algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). However, there remains a considerable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Manan Tomar , Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

In this paper, we present a new policy gradient (PG) methods, namely the block policy mirror descent (BPMD) method for solving a class of regularized reinforcement learning (RL) problems with (strongly)-convex regularizers. Compared to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Guanghui Lan , Yan Li , Tuo Zhao

We apply functional acceleration to the Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) general family of algorithms, which cover a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Leveraging duality, we propose a momentum-based PMD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Veronica Chelu , Doina Precup

We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Yuheng Zhang , Nan Jiang

Learning-to-optimize (L2O) is an emerging research area in large-scale optimization with applications in data science. Recently, researchers have proposed a novel L2O framework called learned mirror descent (LMD), based on the classical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-13 Hong Ye Tan , Subhadip Mukherjee , Junqi Tang , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

We propose a new policy gradient method, named homotopic policy mirror descent (HPMD), for solving discounted, infinite horizon MDPs with finite state and action spaces. HPMD performs a mirror descent type policy update with an additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan
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