← Search

Anas Barakat

6 accepted papers

2025

On the Global Optimality of Policy Gradient Methods in General Utility Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning with general utilities (RLGU) offers a unifying framework to capture several problems beyond standard expected returns, including imitation learning, pure exploration, and safe RL. Despite recent fundamental advances in the theoretical analysis of policy gradient (PG) methods…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Reinforcement Learning with General Utilities: Simpler Variance Reduction and Large State-Action Space

ICML 2023poster

We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular cases constrained RL, pure exploration and learning from dem…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Stochastic Policy Gradient Methods: Improved Sample Complexity for Fisher-non-degenerate Policies

ICML 2023poster

Recently, the impressive empirical success of policy gradient (PG) methods has catalyzed the development of their theoretical foundations. Despite the huge efforts directed at the design of efficient stochastic PG-type algorithms, the understanding of their convergence to a globally optimal policy i…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar
2022

Analysis of a Target-Based Actor-Critic Algorithm with Linear Function Approximation

AISTATS 2022poster

Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in the literature. In this paper, we reduce this gap between th…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar