Related papers: Action-depedent Control Variates for Policy Optimi…
A fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning is to learn policies that generalize beyond the operating domains experienced during training. In this paper, we approach this challenge through the following invariance principle: an agent…
Most solutions to the inventory management problem assume a centralization of information that is incompatible with organisational constraints in real supply chain networks. The inventory management problem is a well-known planning problem…
Leveraging machine learning methods to solve constraint satisfaction problems has shown promising, but they are mostly limited to a static situation where the problem description is completely known and fixed from the beginning. In this…
Modern deep policy gradient methods achieve effective performance on simulated robotic tasks, but they all require large replay buffers or expensive batch updates, or both, making them incompatible for real systems with resource-limited…
Quality-Diversity (QD) is a concept from Neuroevolution with some intriguing applications to Reinforcement Learning. It facilitates learning a population of agents where each member is optimized to simultaneously accumulate high…
The predominant approach in reinforcement learning is to assign credit to actions based on the expected return. However, we show that the return may depend on the policy in a way which could lead to excessive variance in value estimation…
This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…
Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not…
Being able to solve a task in diverse ways makes agents more robust to task variations and less prone to local optima. In this context, constrained diversity optimization has become a useful reinforcement learning (RL) framework for…
Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…
Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of…
Despite success in many challenging problems, reinforcement learning (RL) is still confronted with sample inefficiency, which can be mitigated by introducing prior knowledge to agents. However, many transfer techniques in reinforcement…
Policy gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms coupled with neural networks have shown success in learning complex policies in the model free continuous action space control setting. However, explicitly parameterized policies are…
Several researchers have recently investigated the connection between reinforcement learning and classification. We are motivated by proposals of approximate policy iteration schemes without value functions which focus on policy…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a…
Critical sectors of human society are progressing toward the adoption of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are trained individually on behalf of self-interested principals but deployed in a shared environment. Short of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…
Control variates have become an increasingly popular variance-reduction technique in Bayesian inference. Many broadly applicable control variates are based on the Langevin-Stein operator, which leverages gradient information from any…
In this article, a \underline{S}tate-dependent \underline{M}ulti-\underline{A}gent \underline{D}eep \underline{D}eterministic \underline{P}olicy \underline{G}radient (\textbf{SMADDPG}) method is proposed in order to learn an optimal control…