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Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…
Policy gradient methods are a widely used class of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms where a state-dependent baseline is used to reduce gradient estimator variance. Several recent papers extend the baseline to depend on both the…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…
Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…
Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…
Policy gradient methods have demonstrated success in reinforcement learning tasks that have high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. However, policy gradient methods are also notoriously sample inefficient. This can be…
The control variates (CV) method is widely used in policy gradient estimation to reduce the variance of the gradient estimators in practice. A control variate is applied by subtracting a baseline function from the state-action value…
Reliable robotic manipulation requires control policies that can accurately represent and adapt to uncertainty arising from contact-rich interactions. Modern data-driven methods mitigate uncertainty through large-scale training and…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…
Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…
In reinforcement learning, classic on-policy evaluation methods often suffer from high variance and require massive online data to attain the desired accuracy. Previous studies attempt to reduce evaluation variance by searching for or…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Stochastic gradient-based optimisation for discrete latent variable models is challenging due to the high variance of gradients. We introduce a variance reduction technique for score function estimators that makes use of double control…
Variational inference is increasingly being addressed with stochastic optimization. In this setting, the gradient's variance plays a crucial role in the optimization procedure, since high variance gradients lead to poor convergence. A…
Policy-based methods have achieved remarkable success in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Among these methods, off-policy policy gradient methods are particularly important due to that they can benefit from off-policy…
In this paper, a novel optimal control-based baseline function is presented for the policy gradient method in deep reinforcement learning (RL). The baseline is obtained by computing the value function of an optimal control problem, which is…
We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…