Related papers: Boosting Trust Region Policy Optimization by Norma…
Trust-region methods have yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search. A common approach is to use KL-divergence to bound the region of trust resulting in a natural gradient policy update. We show that the natural gradient and trust…
Trust region-based optimization methods have become foundational reinforcement learning algorithms that offer stability and strong empirical performance in continuous control tasks. Growing interest in scalable and reusable control policies…
Trust region methods, such as TRPO, are often used to stabilize policy optimization algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). While current trust region strategies are effective for continuous control, they typically require a…
We describe an iterative procedure for optimizing policies, with guaranteed monotonic improvement. By making several approximations to the theoretically-justified procedure, we develop a practical algorithm, called Trust Region Policy…
Normalizing flows are constructed from a base distribution with a known density and a diffeomorphism with a tractable Jacobian. The base density of a normalizing flow can be parameterised by a different normalizing flow, thus allowing maps…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…
Reinforcement learning policies are typically represented by black-box neural networks, which are non-interpretable and not well-suited for safety-critical domains. To address both of these issues, we propose constrained normalizing flow…
Normalizing flows are powerful non-parametric statistical models that function as a hybrid between density estimators and generative models. Current learning algorithms for normalizing flows assume that data points are sampled…
Safe and reliable state estimation techniques are a critical component of next-generation robotic systems. Agents in such systems must be able to reason about the intentions and trajectories of other agents for safe and efficient motion…
An algorithm is proposed for solving stochastic and finite sum minimization problems. Based on a trust region methodology, the algorithm employs normalized steps, at least as long as the norms of the stochastic gradient estimates are within…
Normalizing flows are an established approach for modelling complex probability densities through invertible transformations from a base distribution. However, the accuracy with which the target distribution can be captured by the…
We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…
Normalizing Flows are a promising new class of algorithms for unsupervised learning based on maximum likelihood optimization with change of variables. They offer to learn a factorized component representation for complex nonlinear data and,…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms can be seen as versions of approximate policy iteration (API). While standard API often performs poorly, it has been shown that learning can be stabilized by regularizing each policy update by the…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, as a model-free RL method, the success of PPO…
Normalizing flows are a popular class of models for approximating probability distributions. However, their invertible nature limits their ability to model target distributions whose support have a complex topological structure, such as…
In this paper, we study a few challenging theoretical and numerical issues on the well known trust region policy optimization for deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to find a policy that maximizes the total expected reward when the…
Normalizing Flows are generative models that directly maximize the likelihood. Previously, the design of normalizing flows was largely constrained by the need for analytical invertibility. We overcome this constraint by a training procedure…
A Normalizing Flow computes a bijective mapping from an arbitrary distribution to a predefined (e.g. normal) distribution. Such a flow can be used to address different tasks, e.g. anomaly detection, once such a mapping has been learned. In…
Trust region policy optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in Reinforcement Learning (RL) in which a surrogate problem, that restricts consecutive policies to be 'close' to one another, is…