While entropy regularization is widely used to stabilize and accelerate Natural Policy Gradient methods, its ability to yield faster convergence rates for the unregularized objective remains underexplored. Existing analyses often rely on double-loop architectures and invoke a linear entropy penalty.
arXiv:2608. 19587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While entropy regularization is widely used to stabilize and accelerate Natural Policy Gradient methods, its ability to yield faster convergence rates for the unregularized objective remains underexplored.
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:2609. 38880v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the last iterate of standard importance-weighted temporal-difference (TD) learning from a single trajectory of a finite Markov decision process.
arXiv:2609.38880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the last iterate of standard tabular temporal-difference (TD) learning from a single trajectory of a finite Markov reward process. For discoun...
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).
arXiv:2609.36945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the learning dynamics of fine-tuning a policy model on self-generated and reward-weighted data, with particular focus on a generalized version...
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.
arXiv:2610. 10273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite its widespread use, Proximal Policy Optimization with clipping (PPO-Clip) remains difficult to tune, and the interactions among critic learning, clipping, and rollout reuse remain incompletely understood.
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.
We study the last iterate of standard tabular temporal-difference (TD) learning from a single trajectory of a finite Markov reward process. For discount factor $γ$, write $H=(1-γ)^{-1}$, and let $μ_{\...
arXiv:2505.20817v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Gradient clipping is widely used in language-model training to control heavy-tailed gradient noise and can improve convergence guarantees ove...
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...