Related papers: A Closer Look at Deep Policy Gradients
We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…
We develop a normative framework for hierarchical model-based policy optimization based on applying second-order methods in the space of all possible state-action paths. The resulting natural path gradient performs policy updates in a…
Policy gradient algorithms have found wide adoption in NLP, but have recently become subject to criticism, doubting their suitability for NMT. Choshen et al. (2020) identify multiple weaknesses and suspect that their success is determined…
There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…
Differential evolution is one of the most prestigious population-based stochastic optimization algorithm for black-box problems. The performance of a differential evolution algorithm depends highly on its mutation and crossover strategy and…
Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms use value functions to guide the search for better policies. These methods estimate the value of a single policy while generalizing across many states. The core idea of this paper is to flip this…
Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for aligning language models with human preferences. Currently, the evaluation of RMs depends on measuring accuracy against a validation set of manually annotated preference data. Although this method is…
The classical policy gradient method is the theoretical and conceptual foundation of modern policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most rigorous analyses of such methods, particularly those establishing convergence guarantees,…
Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…
Modern policy gradient algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) rely on an arsenal of heuristics, including loss clipping and gradient clipping, to ensure successful learning. These heuristics are reminiscent of techniques from…
Recent advances in deep learning have spurred the development of end-to-end frameworks for portfolio optimization that utilize implicit layers. However, many such implementations are highly sensitive to neural network initialization,…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm PPG (Proximal Policy Gradient), which is close to both VPG (vanilla policy gradient) and PPO (proximal policy optimization). The PPG objective is a partial variation of the VPG objective and the…
We develop a method for policy architecture search and adaptation via gradient-free optimization which can learn to perform autonomous driving tasks. By learning from both demonstration and environmental reward we develop a model that can…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…
Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…
We investigate and analyze principles of typical motion planning algorithms. These include traditional planning algorithms, supervised learning, optimal value reinforcement learning, policy gradient reinforcement learning. Traditional…
We introduce a learning method called ``gradient-based reinforcement planning'' (GREP). Unlike traditional DP methods that improve their policy backwards in time, GREP is a gradient-based method that plans ahead and improves its policy…