Dual Approximation Policy Optimization

Abstract

We propose Dual Approximation Policy Optimization (DAPO), a framework that incorporates general function approximation into policy mirror descent methods. In contrast to the popular approach of using the $L_2$-norm to measure function approximation errors, DAPO uses the dual Bregman divergence induced by the mirror map for policy projection. This duality framework has both theoretical and practical implications: not only does it achieve fast linear convergence with general function approximation, but it also includes several well-known practical methods as special cases, immediately providing strong convergence guarantees.