Related papers: Natural Option Critic
Variational inference transforms posterior inference into parametric optimization thereby enabling the use of latent variable models where otherwise impractical. However, variational inference can be finicky when different variational…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…
In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…
We develop a new policy gradient and actor-critic algorithm for solving mean-field control problems within a continuous time reinforcement learning setting. Our approach leverages a gradient-based representation of the value function,…
Motivated by applications where impatience is pervasive and evaluation times are uncertain, we study a selection model where options may expire at an unknown point in time and evaluation times are stochastic. Initially, the decision-maker…
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…
This paper establishes a mathematical foundation for the Adam optimizer, elucidating its connection to natural gradient descent through Riemannian and information geometry. We provide an accessible and detailed analysis of the diagonal…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…
Being able to seamlessly generalize across different tasks is fundamental for robots to act in our world. However, learning representations that generalize quickly to new scenarios is still an open research problem in reinforcement…
To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…
Fractional gradient descent has been studied extensively, with a focus on its ability to extend traditional gradient descent methods by incorporating fractional-order derivatives. This approach allows for more flexibility in navigating…
Since the objective functions of reinforcement learning problems are typically highly nonconvex, it is desirable that policy gradient, the most popular algorithm, escapes saddle points and arrives at second-order stationary points. Existing…
Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…
We focus on parameterized policy search for reinforcement learning over continuous action spaces. Typically, one assumes the score function associated with a policy is bounded, which fails to hold even for Gaussian policies. To properly…
Due to recent empirical successes, the options framework for hierarchical reinforcement learning is gaining increasing popularity. Rather than learning from rewards which suffers from the curse of dimensionality, we consider learning an…
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…
The natural gradient allows for more efficient gradient descent by removing dependencies and biases inherent in a function's parameterization. Several papers present the topic thoroughly and precisely. It remains a very difficult idea to…
Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…
It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…
We propose expected policy gradients (EPG), which unify stochastic policy gradients (SPG) and deterministic policy gradients (DPG) for reinforcement learning. Inspired by expected sarsa, EPG integrates (or sums) across actions when…