Related papers: Fourier Policy Gradients
We introduce Policy Gradient Guidance (PGG), a simple extension of classifier-free guidance from diffusion models to classical policy gradient methods. PGG augments the policy gradient with an unconditional branch and interpolates…
Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm is one of the most well-known reinforcement learning methods. However, this method is inefficient and unstable in practical applications. On the other hand, the bias and variance of the Q…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…
Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…
Reinforcement learning is a growing field in AI with a lot of potential. Intelligent behavior is learned automatically through trial and error in interaction with the environment. However, this learning process is often costly. Using…
This paper discusses theoretical and experimental aspects of gradient-based approaches to the direct optimization of policy performance in controlled POMDPs. We introduce GPOMDP, a REINFORCE-like algorithm for estimating an approximation to…
Despite their success, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance of the gradient estimate, which can result in unsatisfactory sample complexity. Recently, numerous variance-reduced extensions of policy gradient methods with provably…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
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.…
Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…
A key problem in reinforcement learning for control with general function approximators (such as deep neural networks and other nonlinear functions) is that, for many algorithms employed in practice, updates to the policy or $Q$-function…
Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…
Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…
Projected policy gradient (PPG) is a basic policy optimization method in reinforcement learning. Given access to exact policy evaluations, previous studies have established the sublinear convergence of PPG for sufficiently small step sizes…
Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability. Yet, these models are not typically employed in reinforcement learning as they cannot be updated online via stochastic gradient descent. We…
We propose a method for designing policies for convex stochastic control problems characterized by random linear dynamics and convex stage cost. We consider policies that employ quadratic approximate value functions as a substitute for the…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…