Related papers: Expected Policy Gradients
We develop Policy Gradient with Second-Order Momentum (PG-SOM), a lightweight second-order optimisation scheme for reinforcement-learning policies. PG-SOM augments the classical REINFORCE update with two exponentially weighted statistics: a…
Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot…
Latent Gaussian models have a rich history in statistics and machine learning, with applications ranging from factor analysis to compressed sensing to time series analysis. The classical method for maximizing the likelihood of these models…
Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…
We introduce a fully stochastic gradient based approach to Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED). Our approach utilizes variational lower bounds on the expected information gain (EIG) of an experiment that can be simultaneously…
We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
Policy gradient methods have had great success in solving continuous control tasks, yet the stochastic nature of such problems makes deterministic value estimation difficult. We propose an approach which instead estimates a distribution by…
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have recently been integrated to take the advantage of the both methods for better exploration and exploitation.The evolutionary part in these hybrid methods maintains a…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) often require additional exploration strategies, especially if the actor is of deterministic nature. This work evaluates the use of model-based…
We study the estimation of policy gradients for continuous-time systems with known dynamics. By reframing policy learning in continuous-time, we show that it is possible construct a more efficient and accurate gradient estimator. The…
Reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but learned policies often degrade in performance when test conditions differ from the training distribution. This limitation is especially important in…
Motivated by penalized likelihood maximization in complex models, we study optimization problems where neither the function to optimize nor its gradient have an explicit expression, but its gradient can be approximated by a Monte Carlo…
Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…
We propose a method for finding approximate compilations of quantum unitary transformations, based on techniques from policy gradient reinforcement learning. The choice of a stochastic policy allows us to rephrase the optimization problem…
Equilibrium learning in adversarial games is an important topic widely examined in the fields of game theory and reinforcement learning (RL). Pursuit-evasion game (PEG), as an important class of real-world games from the fields of robotics…
In learning from demonstrations, many generative models of trajectories make simplifying assumptions of independence. Correctness is sacrificed in the name of tractability and speed of the learning phase. The ignored dependencies, which…
This paper considers policy search in continuous state-action reinforcement learning problems. Typically, one computes search directions using a classic expression for the policy gradient called the Policy Gradient Theorem, which decomposes…
Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…