On the linear convergence of natural policy gradient algorithm

S Khodadadian, PR Jhunjhunwala… - 2021 60th IEEE …, 2021 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2021 60th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2021ieeexplore.ieee.org
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration
algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods
inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among these, a popular algorithm is the
Natural Policy Gradient, which is a mirror descent variant for MDPs. This algorithm forms the
basis of several popular RL algorithms such as Natural actor-critic, TRPO, PPO, etc, and so
is being studied with growing interest. It has been shown that Natural Policy Gradient with …
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among these, a popular algorithm is the Natural Policy Gradient, which is a mirror descent variant for MDPs. This algorithm forms the basis of several popular RL algorithms such as Natural actor-critic, TRPO, PPO, etc, and so is being studied with growing interest. It has been shown that Natural Policy Gradient with constant step size converges with a sublinear rate of to the global optimal. In this paper, we present improved finite time convergence bounds, and show that this algorithm has geometric (also known as linear) asymptotic convergence rate. We further improve this convergence result by introducing a variant of Natural Policy Gradient with adaptive step sizes. Finally, we compare different variants of policy gradient methods experimentally.
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