Related papers: A Closer Look at Deep Policy Gradients
Deterministic policy gradient algorithms are foundational for actor-critic methods in controlling continuous systems, yet they often encounter inaccuracies due to their dependence on the derivative of the critic's value estimates with…
State of the art machine learning algorithms are highly optimized to provide the optimal prediction possible, naturally resulting in complex models. While these models often outperform simpler more interpretable models by order of…
We consider the problem of scheduling in constrained queueing networks with a view to minimizing packet delay. Modern communication systems are becoming increasingly complex, and are required to handle multiple types of traffic with widely…
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…
Considering generating samples with high rewards, we focus on optimizing deep neural networks parameterized stochastic differential equations (SDEs), the advanced generative models with high expressiveness, with policy gradient, the leading…
We focus on parameterized policy search for reinforcement learning over continuous action spaces. Typically, one assumes the score function associated with a policy is bounded, which fails to hold even for Gaussian policies. To properly…
Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…
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,…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities in solving complex real-world problems. Yet, the internal mechanisms driving these complex reasoning behaviors remain opaque. Existing interpretability approaches targeting…
The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…
Estimating hyperparameters has been a long-standing problem in machine learning. We consider the case where the task at hand is modeled as the solution to an optimization problem. Here the exact gradient with respect to the hyperparameters…
Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…
Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability. Yet, these models are not typically employed in reinforcement learning as they cannot be updated online via stochastic gradient descent. We…
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…
In this work, we conduct an extensive empirical study of several deep reinforcement learning algorithms on two challenging combinatorial optimization problems: the job-shop and flexible job-shop scheduling problems, both fundamental…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
Faced with data-driven policies, individuals will manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions. While earlier works cast these manipulations as undesirable gaming, recent works have adopted a more nuanced causal framing in which…
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by 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…