Related papers: Policy Optimization with Second-Order Advantage In…
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…
This research reports on the recent development of a black-box optimization method based on single-step deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and on its conceptual proximity to evolution strategy (ES) techniques. In the fashion of policy…
Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) methods, such as Trust Region policy optimization and Proximal policy optimization (PPO), have become the dominant reinforcement learning algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good…
We introduce an order-invariant reinforcement learning framework for black-box combinatorial optimization. Classical estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) often rely on learning explicit variable dependency graphs, which can be…
Policy gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms coupled with neural networks have shown success in learning complex policies in the model free continuous action space control setting. However, explicitly parameterized policies are…
Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…
We consider the problem of learning in adversarial Markov decision processes [MDPs] with an oblivious adversary in a full-information setting. The agent interacts with an environment during $T$ episodes, each of which consists of $H$…
We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…
Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…
Zeroth-order (ZO, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…
Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints…
Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…
A fundamental challenge in model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) lies in the trade-off between generalization and robustness against exploitation errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions. While OOD samples may capture valid…
Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…
Markov Decision Problems (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for modelling sequential decision-making across diverse domains, guided by optimality criteria such as discounted and average rewards. However, these criteria have inherent…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…
Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…
Reinforcement learning has been proven to be highly effective in handling complex control tasks. Traditional methods typically use unimodal distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, to model the output of value distributions. However,…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
Stochastic control with both inherent random system noise and lack of knowledge on system parameters constitutes the core and fundamental topic in reinforcement learning (RL), especially under non-episodic situations where online learning…