{"paper":{"title":"An Improved Convergence Analysis of Stochastic Variance-Reduced Policy Gradient","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","math.OC","stat.ML"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Felicia Gao, Pan Xu, Quanquan Gu","submitted_at":"2019-05-29T17:57:23Z","abstract_excerpt":"We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\\epsilon$-approximate stationary point of the performance function within $O(1/\\epsilon^{5/3})$ trajectories. This sample complexity improves upon the best known result $O(1/\\epsilon^2)$ by a factor of $O(1/\\epsilon^{1/3})$. At the core of our analysis is (i) a tighter upper bound for the variance of importance sampling weights, where we prove that the variance can be controlled "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1905.12615","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}