Related papers: Natural Option Critic
The extended Kalman filter is perhaps the most standard tool to estimate in real time the state of a dynamical system from noisy measurements of some function of the system, with extensive practical applications (such as position tracking…
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,…
The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…
Fisher information and natural gradient provided deep insights and powerful tools to artificial neural networks. However related analysis becomes more and more difficult as the learner's structure turns large and complex. This paper makes a…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…
Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…
Natural gradients can improve convergence in stochastic variational inference significantly but inverting the Fisher information matrix is daunting in high dimensions. Moreover, in Gaussian variational approximation, natural gradient…
We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…
This paper presents a model-free approximation for the Hessian of the performance of deterministic policies to use in the context of Reinforcement Learning based on Quasi-Newton steps in the policy parameters. We show that the approximate…
Temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning is the ability of an agent to learn and use high-level behaviors, called options. The option-critic architecture provides a gradient-based end-to-end learning method to construct options. We…
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…
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…
Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…
Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…
In this article, we discuss two algorithms tailored to discrete-time deterministic finite-horizon nonlinear optimal control problems or so-called deterministic trajectory optimization problems. Both algorithms can be derived from an…
In this paper, we propose new structured second-order methods and structured adaptive-gradient methods obtained by performing natural-gradient descent on structured parameter spaces. Natural-gradient descent is an attractive approach to…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Online decision making aims to learn the optimal decision rule by making personalized decisions and updating the decision rule recursively. It has become easier than before with the help of big data, but new challenges also come along.…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…