Related papers: Global linear convergence of entropy-regularized s…
This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself…
We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…
Many control problems in environments that can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) concern infinite-time horizon specifications. The classical aim in this context is to compute a control policy that maximizes the probability of…
We study decentralized multiagent optimization over networks, modeled as undirected graphs. The optimization problem consists of minimizing a nonconvex smooth function plus a convex extended-value function, which enforces constraints or…
The convergence of deterministic policy gradient under the Hadamard parameterization is studied in the tabular setting and the linear convergence of the algorithm is established. To this end, we first show that the error decreases at an…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…
In this article a unified approach to iterative soft-thresholding algorithms for the solution of linear operator equations in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces is presented. We formulate the algorithm in the framework of generalized…
Dynamic optimization of mean and variance in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a long-standing challenge caused by the failure of dynamic programming. In this paper, we propose a new approach to find the globally optimal policy for…
There are no computationally feasible algorithms that provide solutions to the finite horizon Risk-sensitive Constrained Markov Decision Process (Risk-CMDP) problem, even for problems with moderate horizon. With an aim to design the same,…
Softmax feedback systems are a common mathematical core of entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, logit game dynamics, population choice, and mean-field variational updates. Their central stability question is simple: when does a…
The reinforcement learning algorithm SARSA combined with linear function approximation has been shown to converge for infinite horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs). In this paper, we investigate the convergence of the…
Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…
This paper is on learning the Kalman gain by policy optimization method. Firstly, we reformulate the finite-horizon Kalman filter as a policy optimization problem of the dual system. Secondly, we obtain the global linear convergence of…
Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…
Federated reinforcement learning (RL) enables collaborative decision making of multiple distributed agents without sharing local data trajectories. In this work, we consider a multi-task setting, in which each agent has its own private…
Owing to the growth of interest in Reinforcement Learning in the last few years, gradient based policy control methods have been gaining popularity for Control problems as well. And rightly so, since gradient policy methods have the…
In this paper, we study the controllability and stabilizability properties of the Kolmogorov forward equation of a continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) evolving on a finite state space, using the transition rates as the control parameters.…
Gradient descent dynamics on the deep matrix factorization problem is extensively studied as a simplified theoretical model for deep neural networks. Although the convergence theory for two-layer matrix factorization is well-established, no…
Mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) minimizes an entropy-regularized nonlinear convex functional defined over the space of probability distributions. MFLD has gained attention due to its connection with noisy gradient descent for mean-field…