A Closed-Loop Non-Asymptotic Convergence Analysis of PPO with Learned Critics and Clipping
Despite its widespread use, Proximal Policy Optimization with clipping (PPO-Clip) remains difficult to tune, and the interactions among critic learning, clipping, and rollout reuse remain incompletely understood. We develop a \emph{non-asymptotic} analysis of PPO-Clip as a \emph{closed-loop actor--critic} system. It captures actor--critic coupling, nonsmooth probability-ratio clipping, finite-batch reuse, and predictable early stopping under explicit coverage and critic regularity assumptions, using raw GAE and Monte Carlo critic targets. Our synchronous and asynchronous guarantees jointly characterize policy stationarity and the tracking accuracy of the learned critic, with explicit depe...
| Authors | Junwei Su, Mengfan Liu, Yanyong Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 7 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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