Related papers: Value Mirror Descent for Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically applied directly in environments to learn policies. In some complex environments with continuous state-action spaces, sparse rewards, and/or long temporal horizons, learning a good policy in…
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…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the agnostic policy learning setting, where the goal is to find a policy whose performance is competitive with the best policy in a given class of interest $\Pi$ -- crucially, without assuming that…
Attention mechanisms have revolutionized several domains of artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing and computer vision, by enabling models to selectively focus on relevant parts of the input data. While recent work has…
In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm, called Renewal Monte Carlo (RMC), for infinite horizon Markov decision processes with a designated start state. RMC is a Monte Carlo algorithm and retains the advantages…
This paper revisits the convergence of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) in the contemporary nonconvex optimization setting. Existing results for batch-free nonconvex SMD restrict the choice of the distance generating function (DGF) to be…
Mirror Descent is a popular algorithm, that extends Gradients Descent (GD) beyond the Euclidean geometry. One of its benefits is to enable strong convergence guarantees through smooth-like analyses, even for objectives with exploding or…
Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which,…
Stochastic optimization methods such as mirror descent have wide applications due to low computational cost. Those methods have been well studied under assumption of the independent and identical distribution, and usually achieve sublinear…
Sampling efficiency is a key bottleneck in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Existing group-based policy optimization methods, such as GRPO, allocate a fixed number of rollouts for all training prompts. This uniform allocation…
Singular value decomposition (SVD) and matrix inversion are ubiquitous in scientific computing. Both tasks are computationally demanding for large scale matrices. Existing algorithms can approximatively solve these problems with a given…
While Value Iteration (VI) is one of the most fundamental algorithms in Reinforcement Learning, its theoretical convergence guarantees still exhibit a persistent mismatch with empirical behavior. In the discounted-reward case, classical…
A classical problem in matrix computations is the efficient and reliable approximation of a given matrix by a matrix of lower rank. The truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) is known to provide the best such approximation for any…
Diffusion policies have achieved superior performance in imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their rich expressiveness. However, the conventional diffusion training procedure requires samples from target…
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…
We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…
We consider the problem of simultaneously learning to linearly combine a very large number of kernels and learn a good predictor based on the learnt kernel. When the number of kernels $d$ to be combined is very large, multiple kernel…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…
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…
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…