Related papers: Variance Reduction for Policy Gradient with Action…
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…
Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample…
Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…
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…
We show how an action-dependent baseline can be used by the policy gradient theorem using function approximation, originally presented with action-independent baselines by (Sutton et al. 2000).
We consider reinforcement learning in input-driven environments, where an exogenous, stochastic input process affects the dynamics of the system. Input processes arise in many applications, including queuing systems, robotics control with…
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…
Many problems involve the use of models which learn probability distributions or incorporate randomness in some way. In such problems, because computing the true expected gradient may be intractable, a gradient estimator is used to update…
There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
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…
Policy gradient methods are one of the most successful approaches for solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Despite their empirical successes, many state-of-the-art policy gradient algorithms for discounted problems deviate…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…
This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…
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…
Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
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.…
Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…
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…