Last-Iterate Convergent Policy Gradient Primal-Dual Methods for Constrained MDPs

We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation of policy iterates in these methods has not been fully understood, bringing out issues such as violation of constraints and sensitivity to hyper-parameters. To fill this gap, we employ the Lagrangian method to cast a constrained MDP into a constrained saddle-point problem in which max/min players correspond to primal/dual variables, respectively, and develop two single-time-scale policy-based primal-dual algorithms with non-asymptotic convergence of their policy iterates to an optimal constrained policy. Specifically, we first propose a regularized policy gradient primal-dual (RPG-PD) method that updates the policy using an entropy-regularized policy gradient, and the dual variable via a quadratic-regularized gradient ascent, simultaneously. We prove that the policy primal-dual iterates of RPG-PD converge to a regularized saddle point with a sublinear rate, while the policy iterates converge sublinearly to an optimal constrained policy. We further instantiate RPG-PD in large state or action spaces by including function approximation in policy parametrization, and establish similar sublinear last-iterate policy convergence. Second, we propose an optimistic policy gradient primal-dual (OPG-PD) method that employs the optimistic gradient method to update primal/dual variables, simultaneously. We prove that the policy primal-dual iterates of OPG-PD converge to a saddle point that contains an optimal constrained policy, with a linear rate. To the best of our knowledge, this work appears to be the first non-asymptotic policy last-iterate convergence result for single-time-scale algorithms in constrained MDPs.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer tcAd6/10 · confidence 4/52023-06-27

Summary

This paper studies the problem of policy searching for constrained MDPs. The authors devise two Lagrangian-based named regularized policy gradient primal-dual (RPG-PD) method and optimistic policy gradient primal-dual (OPG-PD) method, respectively. Their methods are single-time-scale and thus insensitive to hyperparameter changes. They also show that the proposed methods have the property of last-iterate convergence and give the convergence rate in theoretical analysis.

Strengths

The paper is well written and easy to follow. The related works section is particularly commendable, providing a comprehensive overview of relevant works in this field. The authors are the first to give a non-asymptotic rates for last-iterate convergence of single-timescale primal-dual methods. The theoretical analysis is technically sound. From my view point this paper can be a nice addition to the literature on constrained policy optimization.

Weaknesses

* The convergence of the proposed methods relies on the strong duality property of CMDPs, which may not be true for general parametrized policy classes (like NNs). * The numerical experiments are only conducted on tabular cases. And I suggest the authors compare their results to more baselines, for example, primal methods like CRPO in [102]. * The paper seems a little bit too long to appear in a conference proceeding. I suggest the author remove some redundant explanations or examples to shorten the paper.

Questions

* The paper only considered constrained MDP with a single constraint as a simplified case. Can the results be generalized to the case of multiple constraints? * Could the homotopic strategy (gradually shrink the regularization term, see [Li et al. 2022]) be applied to the RPG-PD method? Would that yield better theoretical guarantees? [Li et al. 2022] Homotopic Policy Mirror Descent: Policy Convergence, Implicit Regularization, and Improved Sample Complexity Yan Li, Guanghui Lan, Tuo Zhao arXiv:2201.09457

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

See comments above.

Reviewer V7nr7/10 · confidence 4/52023-06-30

Summary

This paper studied the policy gradient primal-dual approach for constraint MDP with last iterate convergence guarantee. A regularized policy gradient primal-dual method is first proposed where regularization on the policy and dual variables are introduced to add curvature to the minimax problem and with appropriately chosen regularization factor, sublinear last-iterate convergence is obtained. An optimistic poicy gradient primal-dual method is then proposed with linear convergence of the squared distance between the last iterate (policy, dual variable) pair and the saddle region under some additional assumptions. The key analysis technique is to bridge the policy update and update in occupancy measure, and CMDP is convex w.r.t. the occupancy measure.

Strengths

The last iterate convergence of algorithm for CMDP is meaningful. The proposed methods with counterparts in minimax optimization are intuitive and explained very well. Multiple varations of CMDP has been studied, i.e., linear function approximation, zero constraint violations. The I went over a majority part of the proofs and have some questions. I will increase my score after the my questions are addressed. The majority of proofs are sound to me.

Weaknesses

I did not find perticular weaknesses of the current paper. The ideas are explained clearly and easy to follow. The limitations are also discussed.

Questions

The first inequality in Page 29 between Line 1045 - Line 1046: could you justify the usage of Lemma 27, since \pi^*_\tau may not be the optimal w.r.t. to dual variable \lambda_t? It seems that there is some order mismatch of the terms (i), (ii) in Eq. (20), where (i) is O(\sqrt{epsilon}) and (ii) is O(epsilon). It is possible to further reduce the sample complexity by carefully selecting \tau?

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

Yes.

Reviewer NJhb7/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-01

Summary

This work shows the first non-asymptotic and policy last-iterate convergence for single-time-scale algorithms in the CMDP literature. In particular, it provides nearly dimension-free sublinear last-iterate policy convergence, sublinear last-iterate policy convergence with function approximation, and problem-dependent linear last-iterate policy convergence.

Strengths

1. This work strengthened the prior works which only guarantee asymptotic last-iterate convergence or value-average or policy-mixture non-asymptotic convergence. 2. It sets up a new framework for analyzing policy-based primal-dual algorithms via the distance of primal-dual iterates to a saddle point.

Weaknesses

1. It is better to give a more formal definition of the "single-time-scale" and "two-time-scale" at the beginning of the paper to help readers better understand the introduction.

Questions

1. Compared with the references [95, 24], if there is any other technical difficulty apart from replacing the convex inequality conditions in constrained convex optimization with the specialty property of CMDP, such as the performance difference lemma? 2. How is the last-iterate converge rate established in this paper compared with the last-iterate converge rates using two-time-scale methods? Are the convergence rates in this paper better? If not, why not, and if it is possible to reduce the gap? 3. For problem (4), why do you directly show that the strong duality holds? Lemma 1 can not be directly applied to the problem (4). 4. In Theorem 6, how strong is the assumption that optimal state visitation distribution is unique given that there may exist multiple optimal policies for CMDP.

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

4 excellent

Presentation

4 excellent

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

See questions

Reviewer jUv58/10 · confidence 3/52023-07-26

Summary

Two single-timescale algorithms (RPG-PD and OPG-PD) are proposed, and their finite-time convergence rates have been derived. The iteration complexity guarantees for RPG-PD are (nearly) dimension-free but are sublinear. Guarantees for OPG-PD are linear but depend on problem-dependent quantities.

Strengths

1. Last-iterate convergence and constraint satisfaction are useful and generally more challenging. Unlike average and mixture performance measures, these do not hide possible oscillations in objective/constraint functions of immediate policy iterates, which can be undesirable for constrained dynamic systems. 2. Empirical studies showing improved performance over existing algorithms. Most notably - RPG-PD and OPG-PD suppress oscillation in utility values while achieving optimal reward values. 3. Very thorough literature survey.

Weaknesses

See Questions. Minor typos 1. At several places, the references are to the results in the appendix, e.g., Theorem 18 below the statement of Thm. 4.

Questions

1. I could not find any explanations/insights on why the previous approaches lead to oscillations while the newly proposed approaches do not. In particular, why does OPG-PD more or less have no oscillations? Also, in Figure 8, the oscillations are more pronounced for smaller parameter choices. Why does that happen? 2. It is unclear how the proposed ideas can be implemented in practice: they involve (a) computing exact expectations or Monte-carlo estimates from a priori unknown distributions and (b) optimizing certain objective functions over the set of all policy distributions, e.g., 6a, 9a, or 27a. These seem very challenging. Can the authors comment on it? 3. While the authors have mentioned the online version as part of future work, do they expect this version to also have the benefits of damped oscillations? 4. In practice, one often may require that the constraints not be violated with high probability. Would the proposed approach extend to cover that scenario as well? 5. What is `optimistic' about the OPG-PD method? Some insights would be helpful for the reader.

Rating

8: Strong Accept: Technically strong paper, with novel ideas, excellent impact on at least one area, or high-to-excellent impact on multiple areas, with excellent evaluation, resources, and reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

4 excellent

Presentation

4 excellent

Contribution

4 excellent

Limitations

Limitations of the proposed techniques have been adequately discussed.

Reviewer tcAd2023-08-13

Thanks for the clarification, I choose to retain my positive evaluation of the manuscript.

Authorsrebuttal2023-08-18

Thank you very much for keeping the positive rating. As we noticed in your previous review that ''I will increase my score after the my questions are addressed'', we were wondering if there are any clarifying issues regarding the questions we could address them better. Many thanks!

Reviewer V7nr2023-08-18

Yes, sure! I am positive about the work and will increase my score.

Program Chairsdecision2023-09-21

Decision

Accept (poster)

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