Related papers: Mirror descent actor-critic methods for entropy re…
Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…
Diffusion Policy has shown great performance in robotic manipulation tasks under stochastic perturbations, due to its ability to model multimodal action distributions. Nonetheless, its reliance on a computationally expensive reverse-time…
We study the error introduced by entropy regularization in infinite-horizon discrete discounted Markov decision processes. We show that this error decreases exponentially in the inverse regularization strength, both in a weighted…
The problem of on-line off-policy evaluation (OPE) has been actively studied in the last decade due to its importance both as a stand-alone problem and as a module in a policy improvement scheme. However, most Temporal Difference (TD) based…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
Recent works in Reinforcement Learning (RL) combine model-free (Mf)-RL algorithms with model-based (Mb)-RL approaches to get the best from both: asymptotic performance of Mf-RL and high sample-efficiency of Mb-RL. Inspired by these works,…
Online safe reinforcement learning (RL) plays a key role in dynamic environments, with applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and cybersecurity. The objective is to learn optimal policies that maximize rewards while satisfying safety…
Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…
This paper is concerned with convergence analysis for the mirror descent (MD) method, a well-known algorithm in convex optimization. An analysis framework via integral quadratic constraints (IQCs) is constructed to analyze the convergence…
Diffusion policies have achieved great success in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their strong expressive capacity. However, the inference of diffusion policy models relies on a slow iterative sampling process, which limits their…
In the Lasry--Lions framework, Mean-Field Games (MFGs) model interactions among an infinite number of agents. However, existing algorithms either require strict monotonicity or only guarantee the convergence of averaged iterates, as in…
We revisit textbook claims that entropy must increase and show that, under time-reversal invariant microscopic dynamics, no universal trajectory-wise or statistical assertion that the coarse-grained entropy $S(t)$ is non-decreasing can…
Most of the recent successful applications of neural networks have been based on training with gradient descent updates. However, for some small networks, other mirror descent updates learn provably more efficiently when the target is…
Consider linear ill-posed problems governed by the system $A_i x = y_i$ for $i =1, \cdots, p$, where each $A_i$ is a bounded linear operator from a Banach space $X$ to a Hilbert space $Y_i$. In case $p$ is huge, solving the problem by an…
Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…
High-order accurate, $\textit{entropy stable}$ numerical methods for hyperbolic conservation laws have attracted much interest over the last decade, but only a few rigorous convergence results are available, particularly in multiple space…
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…
In this paper, we revisit the problem of using in-distribution public data to improve the privacy/utility trade-offs for differentially private (DP) model training. (Here, public data refers to auxiliary data sets that have no privacy…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems,…
In this paper, we propose a novel policy iteration method, called dynamic policy programming (DPP), to estimate the optimal policy in the infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. We prove the finite-iteration and asymptotic l\infty-norm…