Revisiting Policy Gradients for Restricted Policy Classes: Escaping Myopic Local Optima with $k$-step Policy Gradients

This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself fundamentally myopic, i.e. it only improves the policy based on the one-step $Q$-function. In this work, we propose a generalized $k$-step policy gradient method that couples the randomness within a $k$-step time window and can escape the myopic local optima in MDPs with restricted policy classes. We show this new method is theoretically guaranteed to converge to a solution that is exponentially close in performance to the optimal deterministic policy wi...

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