Variance-Reduced Policy Gradient is Nearly Minimax-Optimal
arXiv:2610.13692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms suffer from high estimation variance because they rely on Monte Carlo updates. While off-policy variance reduction mitigates this problem, establishing optimal sample complexity currently requires either restrictive assumptions, such as uniformly bounded importance weights, or impractical second-order operations. In this work, we introduce Loopless Variance-Reduced PG (LVR-PG), a unified theoretical frame…