Related papers: Natural Option Critic
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
Policy gradient methods are one of the most successful approaches for solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Despite their empirical successes, many state-of-the-art policy gradient algorithms for discounted problems deviate…
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) are central to variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), yet their performance is hindered by complex loss landscapes that make their trainability challenging. Quantum natural gradient descent, which…
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…
Markov control algorithms that perform smooth, non-greedy updates of the policy have been shown to be very general and versatile, with policy gradient and Expectation Maximisation algorithms being particularly popular. For these algorithms,…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
The natural gradient field is a vector field that lives on a model equipped with a distinguished Riemannian metric, e.g. the Fisher-Rao metric, and represents the direction of steepest ascent of an objective function on the model with…
In this research we study a finite horizon optimal purchasing problem for items with a mean reverting price process. Under this model a fixed amount of identical items are bought under a given deadline, with the objective of minimizing the…
This paper introduces a method for efficiently approximating the inverse of the Fisher information matrix, a crucial step in achieving effective variational Bayes inference. A notable aspect of our approach is the avoidance of analytically…
We consider the problem of designing sample efficient learning algorithms for infinite horizon discounted reward Markov Decision Process. Specifically, we propose the Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (ANPG) algorithm that utilizes an…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
Model predictive control can optimally deal with nonlinear systems under consideration of constraints. The control performance depends on the model accuracy and the prediction horizon. Recent advances propose to use reinforcement learning…
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 propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient…
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…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
Continual learning aims to enable neural networks to acquire new knowledge on sequential tasks. However, the key challenge in such settings is to learn new tasks without catastrophically forgetting previously learned tasks. We propose the…
This paper introduces a new stochastic optimization method based on the regularized Fisher information matrix (FIM), named SOFIM, which can efficiently utilize the FIM to approximate the Hessian matrix for finding Newton's gradient update…
This paper considers the decision-dependent optimization problem, where the data distributions react in response to decisions affecting both the objective function and linear constraints. We propose a new method termed repeated projected…
We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…