Interaction-Force Transport Gradient Flows

This paper presents a new type of gradient flow geometries over non-negative and probability measures motivated via a principled construction that combines the optimal transport and interaction forces modeled by reproducing kernels. Concretely, we propose the interaction-force transport (IFT) gradient flows and its spherical variant via an infimal convolution of the Wasserstein and spherical MMD Riemannian metric tensors. We then develop a particle-based optimization algorithm based on the JKO-splitting scheme of the mass-preserving spherical IFT gradient flows. Finally, we provide both theoretical global exponential convergence guarantees and empirical simulation results for applying the IFT gradient flows to the sampling task of MMD-minimization studied by Arbel et al. [2019]. Furthermore, we prove that the spherical IFT gradient flow enjoys the best of both worlds by providing the global exponential convergence guarantee for both the MMD and KL energy.

Algorithm for Constrained Markov Decision Process with Linear Convergence

The problem of constrained Markov decision process is considered. An agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its costs (the number of constraints is relatively small). A new dual approach is proposed with the integration of two ingredients: entropy regularized policy optimizer and Vaidya's dual optimizer, both of which are critical to achieve faster convergence. The finite-time error bound of the proposed approach is provided. Despite the challenge of the nonconcave objective subject to nonconcave constraints, the proposed approach is shown to converge (with linear rate) to the global optimum. The complexity expressed in terms of the optimality gap and the constraint violation significantly improves upon the existing primal-dual approaches.