Related papers: Variance Reduction for Policy Gradient with Action…
In this paper, we explore using deep reinforcement learning for problems with multiple agents. Most existing methods for deep multi-agent reinforcement learning consider only a small number of agents. When the number of agents increases,…
Bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) problems can often be framed as optimization problems where the goal is to maximize average performance while having access only to stochastic estimates of the true gradient. Traditionally, stochastic…
We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline…
Policy gradient methods are appealing in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimate. To reduce the variance, the state value function is applied commonly. However, the effect of the state value function…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…
The high variance issue in unbiased policy-gradient methods such as VPG and REINFORCE is typically mitigated by adding a baseline. However, the baseline fitting itself suffers from the underfitting or the overfitting problem. In this paper,…
This paper proposes a novel termination criterion, termed the advantage gap function, for finite state and action Markov decision processes (MDP) and reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating this advantage gap function into the design…
A fundamental challenge in multiagent reinforcement learning is to learn beneficial behaviors in a shared environment with other simultaneously learning agents. In particular, each agent perceives the environment as effectively…
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
Previous work has shown the unreliability of existing algorithms in the batch Reinforcement Learning setting, and proposed the theoretically-grounded Safe Policy Improvement with Baseline Bootstrapping (SPIBB) fix: reproduce the baseline…
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…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
This paper considers policy search in continuous state-action reinforcement learning problems. Typically, one computes search directions using a classic expression for the policy gradient called the Policy Gradient Theorem, which decomposes…
We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based…