Related papers: An Off-policy Policy Gradient Theorem Using Emphat…
Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…
We identify a fundamental problem in policy gradient-based methods in continuous control. As policy gradient methods require the agent's underlying probability distribution, they limit policy representation to parametric distribution…
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…
In partially observable reinforcement learning, offline training gives access to latent information which is not available during online training and/or execution, such as the system state. Asymmetric actor-critic methods exploit such…
We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…
Off-policy reinforcement learning enables near-optimal policy from suboptimal experience, thereby provisions opportunity for artificial intelligence applications in healthcare. Previous works have mainly framed patient-clinician…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware…
Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…
In this work, we propose Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic (BAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm. BAC mathematically formulates the behavior of the policy through autoencoders by providing an accurate estimation of how frequently…
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…
In reinforcement learning, off-policy actor-critic methods like DDPG and TD3 use deterministic policy gradients: the Q-function is learned from environment data, while the actor maximizes it via gradient ascent. We observe that in complex…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…
Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…
Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…
Deterministic-policy actor-critic algorithms for continuous control improve the actor by plugging its actions into the critic and ascending the action-value gradient, which is obtained by chaining the actor's Jacobian matrix with the…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…