mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Wasserstein Policy Gradient for Entropy-Regularized Linear-Quadratic Control

arXiv 2608.07433 ↗First posted 7 Aug 2026math.OC cs.LGcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Wasserstein policy gradient (WPG) updates state-conditional action laws by transport in the action space. We study entropy-regularized discounted linear-quadratic (LQ) control. A Bellman verification argument shows that the unrestricted problem has a linear-Gaussian optimal policy, and the discounted-occupancy-weighted statewise Wasserstein gradient is tangent to this policy class. WPG therefore reduces exactly to a finite-dimensional ODE for the feedback gain and action covariance. We prove that this ODE is globally well posed and converges exponentially from every admissible initialization. For each fixed LQ problem, the exponent has a positive limit as the entropy temperature tends to zero and contains no perturbative factor of the form exp(-c/τ), while retaining the usual dependence on the conditioning of the control problem.

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References · 15

  1. 2018Global Convergence of Policy Gradient Methods for the Linear Quadratic Regulatorcited by 211
  2. 2018Derivative-Free Methods for Policy Optimization: Guarantees for Linear Quadratic Systemscited by 56
  3. 2020Policy Gradient Methods for the Noisy Linear Quadratic Regulator over a Finite Horizoncited by 43
  4. 2019Convergence and sample complexity of gradient methods for the model-free linear quadratic regulator problemcited by 35
  5. 2018Policy Optimization as Wasserstein Gradient Flowscited by 33
  6. 2020Efficient Wasserstein Natural Gradients for Reinforcement Learningcited by 23
  7. 2022Convergence of policy gradient methods for finite-horizon exploratory linear-quadratic control problemscited by 19
  8. 2019Kernelized Wasserstein Natural Gradientcited by 12
  9. 2025Wasserstein Policy Optimizationcited by 12
  10. 2023Fast Policy Learning for Linear Quadratic Control with Entropy Regularizationcited by 11
  11. 2022Trust Region Policy Optimization with Optimal Transport Discrepancies: Duality and Algorithm for Continuous Actionscited by 8
  12. 2023Provably Convergent Policy Optimization via Metric-aware Trust Region Methodscited by 6
3 more
  1. 2026Wasserstein Proximal Policy Gradientcited by 2
  2. 2026A note on convergence of Wasserstein policy optimizationcited by 1
  3. 2026Global Convergence of Wasserstein Policy Gradient for Entropy-Regularized Reinforcement Learningcited by 1

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