Related papers: Clipped Action Policy Gradient
Advantage Learning (AL) seeks to increase the action gap between the optimal action and its competitors, so as to improve the robustness to estimation errors. However, the method becomes problematic when the optimal action induced by the…
A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…
When optimising for conditional value at risk (CVaR) using policy gradients (PG), current methods rely on discarding a large proportion of trajectories, resulting in poor sample efficiency. We propose a reformulation of the CVaR…
In this paper, we investigate a model-free optimal control design that minimizes an infinite horizon average expected quadratic cost of states and control actions subject to a probabilistic risk or chance constraint using input-output data.…
This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…
Estimation of value in policy gradient methods is a fundamental problem. Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) is an exponentially-weighted estimator of an advantage function similar to $\lambda$-return. It substantially reduces the…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…
We study the use of policy gradient algorithms to optimize over a class of generalized Thompson sampling policies. Our central insight is to view the posterior parameter sampled by Thompson sampling as a kind of pseudo-action. Policy…
Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…
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…
Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…
In this paper, a new offline actor-critic learning algorithm is introduced: Sampled Policy Gradient (SPG). SPG samples in the action space to calculate an approximated policy gradient by using the critic to evaluate the samples. This…
Reinforcement learning algorithms such as the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG) has been widely used in continuous control tasks. However, the model-free DDPG algorithm suffers from high sample complexity. In this paper we…
Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this…
Risk-bounded motion planning is an important yet difficult problem for safety-critical tasks. While existing mathematical programming methods offer theoretical guarantees in the context of constrained Markov decision processes, they either…
We propose FACtored Multi-Agent Centralised policy gradients (FACMAC), a new method for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning in both discrete and continuous action spaces. Like MADDPG, a popular multi-agent actor-critic method,…
Clipping the gradient is a known approach to improving gradient descent, but requires hand selection of a clipping threshold hyperparameter. We present AutoClip, a simple method for automatically and adaptively choosing a gradient clipping…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…