The paper introduces Convex-Concave Reinforcement Learning (CCRL), showing that the exact per‑iteration objective in policy learning can be expressed as a difference‑of‑convex (DC) program in log‑density‑ratio coordinates. This formulation unifies existing methods such as CPI, NPG, TRPO, and AWR as special cases and enables a multi‑step axis that couples consecutive decisions. Using sequential convex programming, the authors provide convergence guarantees and demonstrate that CCRL outperforms or matches PPO on diagnostic MDPs, classic control tasks, and a stochastic mid‑horizon healthcare domain, achieving faster convergence and higher training‑curve area.
arXiv:2606. 25012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting require optimizing multiple conflicting objectives while satisfying multiple safety constraints.
arXiv:2607. 22982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural Policy Gradient (NPG) is a well-established Reinforcement Learning algorithm that underlies widely used methods such as Trust Region Policy Optimization and Proximal Policy Optimization, both of which have demonstrated strong empirical success.
The paper introduces Policy Gradient Penalty (PGP), a single‑loop policy‑space method that enforces convex occupancy‑measure constraints via quadratic‑penalty regularization. PGP constructs pseudo‑rewards to estimate gradients of the penalized objective and uses the classical Policy Gradient Theorem, establishing smoothness and global last‑iterate convergence guarantees for an ε‑optimal constrained entropy value with ε‑bounded constraint violation. The authors validate PGP with ablations on a grid‑world benchmark and demonstrate scalability on two challenging continuous‑control tasks.
arXiv:2512. 23075v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policy gradient methods for Large Language Models optimize a policy $\pi_\theta$ via a surrogate objective computed from samples of a rollout policy $\pi_{\text{roll}}$.
arXiv:2610.09577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study finite-horizon online resource allocation with i.i.d. requests and an endogenous Markov state on a finite state space: each action affects the...
arXiv:2609.36486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study an unknown-transition finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) with a finite collection of known reward functions $\{r^1, r^2, \ldots, r^M...
arXiv:2609.37660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study nonpreemptive contextual queueing bandits in a single-server system. Each job is represented by a $d$-dimensional context vector; in each roun...
The paper presents a convergence framework for deep $V$‑learning over a finite horizon $H$, deriving explicit bounds on policy loss by decomposing the Bellman update error into six residuals. It shows how $L^s$ concentrability controls expected $L^1$ loss, quantifies the impact of shared sampling across horizon levels, and provides optimal and near‑optimal sample allocations for statistical error rates. The work also establishes sharp action‑gap bounds under a margin condition, transfers optimal‑gap results to frozen‑iterate gaps, and offers consistency guarantees for generative‑reset approximate‑ERM procedures with exact action scores.
The paper introduces Fast Regularized Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) that pairs policy updates with a single temporal-difference (TD) critic step. It proves global linear convergence for finite discounted MDPs using exact coordinate-wise Bellman updates and any positive actor stepsize, regardless of critic initialization. For stochastic TD-PMD with strongly convex mirror maps, the authors achieve an expected value gap of ε after “~O(1/((1-γ)^5 σ_b ε))” transitions, without requiring trajectory resets, generative models, or nested policy evaluation loops.
arXiv:2511. 02577v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely regarded as one of the most successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, known for its robustness and effectiveness across a range of problems.
arXiv:2610.08384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we consider decision-focused learning (DFL) for a Markov decision process (MDP), where existing methods differentiate through the KKT con...
arXiv:2604. 06039v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL).