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Related papers: A Closer Look at Deep Policy Gradients

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Traditional model-based reinforcement learning approaches learn a model of the environment dynamics without explicitly considering how it will be used by the agent. In the presence of misspecified model classes, this can lead to poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Pierluca D'Oro , Alberto Maria Metelli , Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli

Deep reinforcement learning includes a broad family of algorithms that parameterise an internal representation, such as a value function or policy, by a deep neural network. Each algorithm optimises its parameters with respect to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Matteo Hessel , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh , David Silver

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

In the recent years, various gradient descent algorithms including the methods of gradient descent, gradient descent with momentum, adaptive gradient (AdaGrad), root-mean-square propagation (RMSProp) and adaptive moment estimation (Adam)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Abel C. H. Chen

Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 W. J. A. van Heeswijk

Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-14 Yemi Okesanjo , Victor Kofia

Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning are two ends of a spectrum. Learning a good policy without a dynamic model can be prohibitively expensive. Learning the dynamic model of a system can reduce the cost of learning the policy,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Arash Mehrjou , Ashkan Soleymani , Stefan Bauer , Bernhard Schölkopf

We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Sanghyun Son , Laura Yu Zheng , Ryan Sullivan , Yi-Ling Qiao , Ming C. Lin

Can deep reinforcement learning algorithms be exploited as solvers for optimal trading strategies? The aim of this work is to test reinforcement learning algorithms on conceptually simple, but mathematically non-trivial, trading…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2020-04-10 Ayman Chaouki , Stephen Hardiman , Christian Schmidt , Emmanuel Sérié , Joachim de Lataillade

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Yunhao Tang , Tadashi Kozuno , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Many modern deep learning applications require balancing multiple objectives that are often conflicting. Examples include multi-task learning, fairness-aware learning, and the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). This leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Weiyu Chen , Baijiong Lin , Xiaoyuan Zhang , Xi Lin , Han Zhao , Qingfu Zhang , James T. Kwok

In high dimensional settings, density estimation algorithms rely crucially on their inductive bias. Despite recent empirical success, the inductive bias of deep generative models is not well understood. In this paper we propose a framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-09 Shengjia Zhao , Hongyu Ren , Arianna Yuan , Jiaming Song , Noah Goodman , Stefano Ermon

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Gavin McCracken , Colin Daniels , Rosie Zhao , Anna Brandenberger , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup

Our work focuses on training RL agents on multiple visually diverse environments to improve observational generalization performance. In prior methods, policy and value networks are separately optimized using a disjoint network architecture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Seungyong Moon , JunYeong Lee , Hyun Oh Song

We develop an optimization framework centered around a core idea: once a (parametric) policy is specified, control authority is transferred to the policy, resulting in an autonomous dynamical system. Thus we should be able to optimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Emo Todorov

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning have become increasingly prevalent for state-of-the-art performance in continuous control tasks. Novel methods typically benchmark against a few key algorithms such as deep deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-15 Riashat Islam , Peter Henderson , Maziar Gomrokchi , Doina Precup

This work adopts the very successful distributional perspective on reinforcement learning and adapts it to the continuous control setting. We combine this within a distributed framework for off-policy learning in order to develop what we…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many challenging strategy games. Because these games have complicated rules, an action sampled from the full discrete action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Shengyi Huang , Santiago Ontañón