Related papers: Approximate Policy Iteration Schemes: A Comparison

Howard's Policy Iteration (HPI) is a classic algorithm for solving Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). HPI uses a "greedy" switching rule to update from any non-optimal policy to a dominating one, iterating until an optimal policy is found.…

We study safe policy improvement (SPI) for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). SPI is an offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem that assumes access to (1) historical data about an environment, and (2) the so-called…

Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) aims at provable guarantees that a learned policy is at least approximately as good as a given baseline policy. Building on SPI with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping (Soft-SPIBB) by Nadjahi et al., we identify…

Modified policy iteration (MPI) is a dynamic programming algorithm that combines elements of policy iteration and value iteration. The convergence of MPI has been well studied in the context of discounted and average-cost MDPs. In this…

Tackling large approximate dynamic programming or reinforcement learning problems requires methods that can exploit regularities, or intrinsic structure, of the problem in hand. Most current methods are geared towards exploiting the…

In this paper, we propose a generalized successive approximation method (SAM), called invariantly admissible policy iteration (PI), for finding the solution to a class of input-affine nonlinear optimal control problems by iterations. Unlike…

Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely used family of algorithms to compute optimal policies for Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). We derive upper bounds on the running time of PI on Deterministic MDPs (DMDPs): the class of MDPs in which every…

Recent control algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) have been designed using an implicit analogy with well-established optimization algorithms. In this paper, we adopt the quasi-Newton method (QNM) from convex optimization to…

In this work, we consider a cooperative multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) involving m agents. At each decision epoch, all the m agents independently select actions in order to maximize a common long-term objective. In the policy…

We consider the stochastic single node energy storage problem (SNES) and revisit Approximate Policy Iteration (API) to solve SNES. We show that the performance of API can be boosted by using neural networks as an approximation architecture…

Given a discounted cost, we study deterministic discrete-time systems whose inputs are generated by policy iteration (PI). We provide novel near-optimality and stability properties, while allowing for non stabilizing initial policies. That…

Motivated from Bertsekas' recent study on policy iteration (PI) for solving the problems of infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in an on-line setting, we develop an off-line PI integrated with a multi-policy…

In this paper we discuss $\l$-policy iteration, a method for exact and approximate dynamic programming. It is intermediate between the classical value iteration (VI) and policy iteration (PI) methods, and it is closely related to optimistic…

The question of knowing whether the policy Iteration algorithm (PI) for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has exponential or (strongly) polynomial complexity has attracted much attention in the last 50 years. Recently, Fearnley…

We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

We consider inexact policy iteration methods for large-scale infinite-horizon discounted MDPs with finite spaces, a variant of policy iteration where the policy evaluation step is implemented inexactly using an iterative solver for linear…

We consider the problem of finding good finite-horizon policies for POMDPs under the expected reward metric. The policies considered are {em free finite-memory policies with limited memory}; a policy is a mapping from the space of…

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model stochastic systems in many applications. Several efficient algorithms to compute optimal policies have been studied in the literature, including value iteration (VI) and policy iteration.…