Towards Painless Policy Optimization for Constrained MDPs

Arushi Jain, Sharan Vaswani, Reza Babanezhad Harikandeh, Csaba Szepesvari, Doina Precup

Keywords: Constrained Markov Decision Processes, Policy Optimization, Online Linear Optimization, Primal-Dual Algorithm

TL;DR: Propose a theoretically sound, robust primal-dual algorithm to solve CMDPs in the linear function approximation setting.

Abstract: We study policy optimization in an infinite horizon, $\gamma$-discounted constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Our objective is to return a policy that achieves large expected reward with a small constraint violation. We consider the online setting with linear function approximation and assume global access to the corresponding features. We propose a generic primal-dual framework that allows us to bound the reward sub-optimality and constraint violation for arbitrary algorithms in terms of their primal and dual regret on online linear optimization problems. We instantiate this framework to use coin-betting algorithms and propose the Coin Betting Politex (CBP) algorithm. Assuming that the action-value functions are $\epsilon_{\text{\tiny{b}}}$-close to the span of the $d$-dimensional state-action features and no sampling errors, we prove that $T$ iterations of CBP result in an $O\left(\frac{1}{(1 - \gamma)^3 \sqrt{T}} + \frac{\epsilon_{\text{\tiny{b}}} \sqrt{d}}{(1 - \gamma)^2} \right)$ reward sub-optimality and an $O\left(\frac{1}{(1 - \gamma)^2 \sqrt{T}} + \frac{\epsilon_{\text{\tiny{b}}} \sqrt{d}}{1 - \gamma} \right)$ constraint violation. Importantly, unlike gradient descent-ascent and other recent methods, CBP does not require extensive hyperparameter tuning. Via experiments on synthetic and Cartpole environments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CBP.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/towards-painless-policy-optimization-for/code)