Related papers: Natural Option Critic
This paper bridges optimization and control, and presents a novel closed-loop control framework based on natural gradient descent, offering a trajectory-oriented alternative to traditional cost-function tuning. By leveraging the Fisher…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…
We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…
Natural gradients have long been studied in deep reinforcement learning due to their fast convergence properties and covariant weight updates. However, computing natural gradients requires inversion of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) at…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…
A deep neural network is a hierarchical nonlinear model transforming input signals to output signals. Its input-output relation is considered to be stochastic, being described for a given input by a parameterized conditional probability…
This paper deals with estimating model parameters in graphical models. We reformulate it as an information geometric optimization problem and introduce a natural gradient descent strategy that incorporates additional meta parameters. We…
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…
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…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning robotics controllers. It has recently been shown that algorithms based on finite-difference estimates of the policy gradient are competitive with algorithms based on the policy…
We cast Amari's natural gradient in statistical learning as a specific case of Kalman filtering. Namely, applying an extended Kalman filter to estimate a fixed unknown parameter of a probabilistic model from a series of observations, is…
We consider sequential decision problems in which we adaptively choose one of finitely many alternatives and observe a stochastic reward. We offer a new perspective of interpreting Bayesian ranking and selection problems as adaptive…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…
We develop policy gradients methods for stochastic control with exit time in a model-free setting. We propose two types of algorithms for learning either directly the optimal policy or by learning alternately the value function (critic) and…
We study policy gradient for mean-field control in continuous time in a reinforcement learning setting. By considering randomised policies with entropy regularisation, we derive a gradient expectation representation of the value function,…
Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…