{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/reward-weighted-regression-converges-to-a","title":"Reward-Weighted Regression Converges to a Global Optimum","arxiv_id":"2107.09088","date":"2021-07-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Miroslav Štrupl","Francesco Faccio","Dylan R. Ashley","Rupesh Kumar Srivastava","Jürgen Schmidhuber"],"abstract":"Reward-Weighted Regression (RWR) belongs to a family of widely known iterative Reinforcement Learning algorithms based on the Expectation-Maximization framework. In this family, learning at each iteration consists of sampling a batch of trajectories using the current policy and fitting a new policy to maximize a return-weighted log-likelihood of actions. Although RWR is known to yield monotonic improvement of the policy under certain circumstances, whether and under which conditions RWR converges to the optimal policy have remained open questions. In this paper, we provide for the first time a proof that RWR converges to a global optimum when no function approximation is used, in a general compact setting. Furthermore, for the simpler case with finite state and action spaces we prove R-linear convergence of the state-value function to the optimum.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09088v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.09088v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"reward-weighted-regression-converges-to-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/dylanashley/reward-weighted-regression","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"regression-1","task_name":"regression"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2107.09088","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2107.09088","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2107.09088"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/dylanashley/reward-weighted-regression","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"ab714138e72409b4","entry":"list_of_dicts_to_dict_of_lists","repo":"dylanashley/reward-weighted-regression","repo_kind":"official","path":"tools.py","file_url":"https://github.com/dylanashley/reward-weighted-regression/blob/HEAD/tools.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ab714138e72409b4"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}