Related papers: Value Mirror Descent for Reinforcement Learning
We study how to learn $\epsilon$-optimal strategies in zero-sum imperfect information games (IIG) with trajectory feedback. In this setting, players update their policies sequentially based on their observations over a fixed number of…
Many machine learning tasks can be solved by minimizing a convex function of an occupancy measure over the policies that generate them. These include reinforcement learning, imitation learning, among others. This more general paradigm is…
Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…
Processes (MDPs) often require frequent decision making, that is, taking an action every microsecond, second, or minute. Infinite horizon discount reward formulation is still relevant for a large portion of these applications, because…
Low-rank and nonsmooth matrix optimization problems capture many fundamental tasks in statistics and machine learning. While significant progress has been made in recent years in developing efficient methods for \textit{smooth} low-rank…
Updating a truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is crucial in representation learning, especially when dealing with large-scale data matrices that continuously evolve in practical scenarios. Aligning SVD-based models with fast-paced…
Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general…
Value iteration is a well-known method of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that is simple to implement and boasts strong theoretical convergence guarantees. However, the computational cost of value iteration quickly becomes…
The minimax excess risk optimization (MERO) problem is a new variation of the traditional distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem, which achieves uniformly low regret across all test distributions under suitable conditions. In…
Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…
We study an explicit mirror-descent method for finite-horizon deterministic optimal control problems. The method is motivated by Pontryagin's maximum principle: at each iteration, one solves the state and adjoint equations and updates the…
Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…
This paper analyzes reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the average-reward criterion. We focus on Q-learning algorithms based on relative value iteration (RVI), which are model-free stochastic…
Reinforcement learning algorithms can solve dynamic decision-making and optimal control problems. With continuous-valued state and input variables, reinforcement learning algorithms must rely on function approximators to represent the value…
We revisit the classical problem of estimating an unknown distribution from its samples by fitting a mixture model that minimizes cross-entropy loss. Framing the task as a stochastic convex optimization problem over the space of $ M…
Mirror Descent (MD) is a scalable first-order method widely used in large-scale optimization, with applications in image processing, policy optimization, and neural network training. This paper generalizes MD to optimization on Riemannian…
Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…
We consider the infinite-horizon linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the transition probabilities of the dynamic model can be linearly parameterized with the help of a predefined low-dimensional feature mapping. While the…