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Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Adrien Bolland , Gilles Louppe , Damien Ernst

We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Adrien Bolland , Ioannis Boukas , Mathias Berger , Damien Ernst

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Kaiqing Zhang , Alec Koppel , Hao Zhu , Tamer Başar

In this paper, we implement three state-of-art continuous reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Policy Gradient (PG)in portfolio management. All of them are…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2018-11-20 Zhipeng Liang , Hao Chen , Junhao Zhu , Kangkang Jiang , Yanran Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Runyu Lu , Peng Zhang , Ruochuan Shi , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao , Yang Liu , Dong Wang , Cesare Alippi

Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-06-09 Aviv Tamar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Ehsan Imani , Eric Graves , Martha White

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Zilun Peng , Ahmed Touati , Pascal Vincent , Doina Precup

The softmax policy gradient (PG) method, which performs gradient ascent under softmax policy parameterization, is arguably one of the de facto implementations of policy optimization in modern reinforcement learning. For $\gamma$-discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous action spaces is often approached by directly training parametric policies along the direction of estimated policy gradients (PGs). Previous research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Gang Chen

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

We propose Fractional Policy Gradients (FPG), a reinforcement learning framework incorporating fractional calculus for long-term temporal modeling in policy optimization. Standard policy gradient approaches face limitations from Markovian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Urvi Pawar , Kunal Telangi

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on exploration to discover new behaviors, which is typically achieved by following a stochastic policy. In continuous control tasks, policies with a Gaussian distribution have been widely adopted.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Dmytro Korenkevych , A. Rupam Mahmood , Gautham Vasan , James Bergstra

Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) has been used to mitigate the computational complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) by employing an exponentially weighted estimation of the advantage function to reduce the variance in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shahil Shaik , Jonathon M. Smereka , Yue Wang

Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Jie Feng , Ke Wei , Jinchi Chen

Solving the Goal-Conditioned Reward Sparse (GCRS) task is a challenging reinforcement learning problem due to the sparsity of reward signals. In this work, we propose a new formulation of GCRS tasks from the perspective of the drifted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Hao Sun , Xinyu Pan , Bo Dai , Dahua Lin , Bolei Zhou

Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Hyunin Lee , Javad Lavaei

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel