{"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/towards-painless-policy-optimization-for","title":"Towards Painless Policy Optimization for Constrained MDPs","arxiv_id":"2204.05176","date":"2022-04-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Arushi Jain","Sharan Vaswani","Reza Babanezhad","Csaba Szepesvari","Doina Precup"],"abstract":"We study policy optimization in an infinite horizon, $\\gamma$-discounted constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Our objective is to return a policy that achieves large expected reward with a small constraint violation. We consider the online setting with linear function approximation and assume global access to the corresponding features. We propose a generic primal-dual framework that allows us to bound the reward sub-optimality and constraint violation for arbitrary algorithms in terms of their primal and dual regret on online linear optimization problems. We instantiate this framework to use coin-betting algorithms and propose the Coin Betting Politex (CBP) algorithm. Assuming that the action-value functions are $\\varepsilon_b$-close to the span of the $d$-dimensional state-action features and no sampling errors, we prove that $T$ iterations of CBP result in an $O\\left(\\frac{1}{(1 - \\gamma)^3 \\sqrt{T}} + \\frac{\\varepsilon_b\\sqrt{d}}{(1 - \\gamma)^2} \\right)$ reward sub-optimality and an $O\\left(\\frac{1}{(1 - \\gamma)^2 \\sqrt{T}} + \\frac{\\varepsilon_b \\sqrt{d}}{1 - \\gamma} \\right)$ constraint violation. Importantly, unlike gradient descent-ascent and other recent methods, CBP does not require extensive hyperparameter tuning. Via experiments on synthetic and Cartpole environments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CBP.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05176v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05176v1.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":"towards-painless-policy-optimization-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/arushijain94/coinbettingpolitex","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2204.05176","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2204.05176"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+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/arushijain94/coinbettingpolitex","reach":null}],"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":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"e448dbc4fcba98db","entry":"get_max_grad_policy","repo":"arushijain94/coinbettingpolitex","repo_kind":"official","path":"Tabular/ModelBased/CBP.py","file_url":"https://github.com/arushijain94/coinbettingpolitex/blob/HEAD/Tabular/ModelBased/CBP.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e448dbc4fcba98db"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}