Related papers: Natural Option Critic
While the optimization landscape of policy gradient methods has been recently investigated for partially observed linear systems in terms of both static output feedback and dynamical controllers, they only provide convergence guarantees to…
This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…
Latent variable models are powerful tools for modeling complex phenomena involving in particular partially observed data, unobserved variables or underlying complex unknown structures. Inference is often difficult due to the latent…
Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
The natural gradient descent optimisation technique is an efficient optimising protocol for broad classes of classical and quantum systems that takes the underlying geometry of the parameter manifold into account by means of using either…
The most common approaches for solving stochastic resource allocation problems in the research literature is to either use value functions ("dynamic programming") or scenario trees ("stochastic programming") to approximate the impact of a…
Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…
There are many approaches for training decision trees. This work introduces a novel gradient-based method for constructing decision trees that optimize arbitrary differentiable loss functions, overcoming the limitations of heuristic…
Can stochastic gradient methods track a moving target? We study the problem of tracking multidimensional time-varying parameters under noisy observations and possible model misspecification. Gradient-based filters update the time-varying…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
Reinforcement learning provides a mathematical framework for learning-based control, whose success largely depends on the amount of data it can utilize. The efficient utilization of historical trajectories obtained from previous policies is…
Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to the curse of dimensionality induced by the non-stationarity of optimal policies. In this work,…
A widely used heuristic for solving stochastic optimization problems is to use a deterministic rolling horizon procedure, which has been modified to handle uncertainty (e.g. buffer stocks, schedule slack). This approach has been criticized…
We study the risk-sensitive exponential cost MDP formulation and develop a trajectory-based gradient algorithm to find the stationary point of the cost associated with a set of parameterized policies. We derive a formula that can be used to…
The option-critic architecture (Bacon, Harb, and Precup 2017) and several variants have successfully demonstrated the use of the options framework proposed by Sutton et al (Sutton, Precup, and Singh1999) to scale learning and planning in…
The multidimensional Uncertain Volatility Model leads to robust option pricing problems under joint volatility and correlation uncertainty. Their numerical resolution quickly becomes challenging because the associated stochastic control…
Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…
Many machine learning problems can be expressed as the optimization of some cost functional over a parametric family of probability distributions. It is often beneficial to solve such optimization problems using natural gradient methods.…
Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…