03/05/2021

Global optimality of softmax policy gradient with single hidden layer neural networks in the mean-field regime

Andrea Agazzi, Jianfeng Lu

Keywords: policy gradient, mean-field dynamics, entropy regularization, neural networks

Abstract: We study the problem of policy optimization for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes with softmax policy and nonlinear function approximation trained with policy gradient algorithms. We concentrate on the training dynamics in the mean-field regime, modeling e.g. the behavior of wide single hidden layer neural networks, when exploration is encouraged through entropy regularization. The dynamics of these models is established as a Wasserstein gradient flow of distributions in parameter space. We further prove global optimality of the fixed points of this dynamics under mild conditions on their initialization.

 0
 0
 0
 0
This is an embedded video. Talk and the respective paper are published at ICLR 2021 virtual conference. If you are one of the authors of the paper and want to manage your upload, see the question "My papertalk has been externally embedded..." in the FAQ section.

Comments

Post Comment
no comments yet
code of conduct: tbd

Similar Papers