Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as videogames, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global convergence of PG methods is lacking in the literature. In this work, we close the gap by viewing PG methods from a nonconvex optimization perspective. In particular, we propose a new variant of PG methods for infinite-horizon problems that uses a random rollout horizon for the Monte-Carlo estimation of the policy gradient. This method then yields an unbiased estimate of the policy gradient with bounded variance, which enables the tools from nonconvex optimization to be applied to establish global convergence. Employing this perspective, we first recover the convergence results with rates to the stationary-point policies in the literature. More interestingly, motivated by advances in nonconvex optimization, we modify the proposed PG method by introducing periodically enlarged stepsizes. The modified algorithm is shown to escape saddle points under mild assumptions on the reward and the policy parameterization. Under a further strict saddle points assumption, this result establishes convergence to essentially locally optimal policies of the underlying problem, and thus bridges the gap in existing literature on the convergence of PG methods. Results from experiments on the inverted pendulum are then provided to corroborate our theory, namely, by slightly reshaping the reward function to satisfy our assumption, unfavorable saddle points can be avoided and better limit points can be attained. Intriguingly, this empirical finding justifies the benefit of reward-reshaping from a nonconvex optimization perspective.

本研究从非凸优化的角度出发，提出一种新的PG method变体，利用随机滚动谱估计策略梯度，实现策略梯度的无偏估计，并在严格鞍点假设下，证明了算法的收敛性。最终，实验证明，通过重新设计奖赏函数，可以避免不良鞍点并获得更好的极限点。

策略梯度方法全局收敛到(几乎)局部最优策略