Related papers: The Divergence of Reinforcement Learning Algorithm…
We study inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and imitation learning (IM), the problems of recovering a reward or policy function from expert's demonstrated trajectories. We propose a new way to improve the learning process by adding a…
Policy evaluation in reinforcement learning is often conducted using two-timescale stochastic approximation, which results in various gradient temporal difference methods such as GTD(0), GTD2, and TDC. Here, we provide convergence rate…
Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…
This survey (re)introduces reinforcement learning methods to economists. The curse of dimensionality limits how far exact dynamic programming can be effectively applied, forcing us to rely on suitably "small" problems or our ability to…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…
This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…
We consider emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithms for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes with finite spaces. Such algorithms were recently proposed by Sutton, Mahmood, and White (2015) as an improved…
Myopic exploration policies such as epsilon-greedy, softmax, or Gaussian noise fail to explore efficiently in some reinforcement learning tasks and yet, they perform well in many others. In fact, in practice, they are often selected as the…
Since the objective functions of reinforcement learning problems are typically highly nonconvex, it is desirable that policy gradient, the most popular algorithm, escapes saddle points and arrives at second-order stationary points. Existing…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction…
Policy-based reinforcement learning algorithms are widely used in various fields. Among them, mainstream policy optimization algorithms such as TRPO and PPO introduce importance sampling into policy iteration, which allows the reuse of…
We study greedy-type algorithms such that at a greedy step we pick several dictionary elements contrary to a single dictionary element in standard greedy-type algorithms. We call such greedy algorithms {\it super greedy algorithms}. The…
Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…
This paper proposes GProp, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous policies with compatible function approximation. The algorithm is based on two innovations. Firstly, we present a temporal-difference based method for…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and general framework for decision making and control, but its application in practice is often hindered by the need for extensive feature and reward engineering. Deep reinforcement learning…
We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and finite-memory approximations for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We first present an algorithm for the value evaluation of finite-memory feedback…
Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…
When the agent's observations or interactions are delayed, classic reinforcement learning tools usually fail. In this paper, we propose a simple yet new and efficient solution to this problem. We assume that, in the undelayed environment,…