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This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-07-09 Angelia Nedich , Soomin Lee

We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ben Hambly , Renyuan Xu , Huining Yang

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Michael Lu , Matin Aghaei , Anant Raj , Sharan Vaswani

With the improvement of computer performance and the development of GPU-accelerated technology, trading with machine learning algorithms has attracted the attention of many researchers and practitioners. In this research, we propose a novel…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2021-03-23 Huanming Zhang , Zhengyong Jiang , Jionglong Su

Distribution-based search algorithms are an effective approach for evolutionary reinforcement learning of neural network controllers. In these algorithms, gradients of the total reward with respect to the policy parameters are estimated…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Nihat Engin Toklu , Paweł Liskowski , Rupesh Kumar Srivastava

We prove new upper and lower bounds for sample complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of an infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) given access to a generative model. When the mixing time of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

We derive a policy gradient theorem for Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) objectives in finite-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL), generalizing the standard policy gradient theorem and encompassing distortion-based risk objectives as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Olivier Lepel , Anas Barakat

We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

The policy gradient theorem gives a convenient form of the policy gradient in terms of three factors: an action value, a gradient of the action likelihood, and a state distribution involving discounting called the \emph{discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Fengdi Che , Gautham Vasan , A. Rupam Mahmood

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for constrained MDPs (CMDPs) is an increasingly important problem for various applications. Often, the average criterion is more suitable than the discounted criterion. Yet, RL for average-CMDPs (ACMDPs) remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

Multi-model Markov decision process (MMDP) is a promising framework for computing policies that are robust to parameter uncertainty in MDPs. MMDPs aim to find a policy that maximizes the expected return over a distribution of MDP models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Xihong Su , Marek Petrik

This paper introduces the $(\alpha, \Gamma)$-descent, an iterative algorithm which operates on measures and performs $\alpha$-divergence minimisation in a Bayesian framework. This gradient-based procedure extends the commonly-used…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-10-25 Kamélia Daudel , Randal Douc , François Portier

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 John Schulman , Philipp Moritz , Sergey Levine , Michael Jordan , Pieter Abbeel

In this paper, we study a mean-variance optimization problem in an infinite horizon discrete time discounted Markov decision process (MDP). The objective is to minimize the variance of system rewards with the constraint of mean performance.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-24 Li Xia

We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Han Zhong , Zhongren Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Csaba Szepesvári

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

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