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Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
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…
Derivatives of computer graphics, image processing, and deep learning algorithms have tremendous use in guiding parameter space searches, or solving inverse problems. As the algorithms become more sophisticated, we no longer only need to…
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…
Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…
In this paper, we study a few challenging theoretical and numerical issues on the well known trust region policy optimization for deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to find a policy that maximizes the total expected reward when the…
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…
Coded distributed computation has become common practice for performing gradient descent on large datasets to mitigate stragglers and other faults. This paper proposes a novel algorithm that encodes the partial derivatives themselves and…
Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…
Traditional nonparametric estimation methods often lead to a slow convergence rate in large dimensions and require unrealistically enormous sizes of datasets for reliable conclusions. We develop an approach based on partial derivatives,…
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…
This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that was inspired by previous tree structured architectures which were only useable in discrete action spaces. Policy Prediction Network offers a way to improve sample…
Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…
Policy gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms coupled with neural networks have shown success in learning complex policies in the model free continuous action space control setting. However, explicitly parameterized policies are…
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…
Policy gradient algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning and belong to the class of approximate dynamic programming methods. This paper studies two key policy gradient algorithms, the Natural Policy Gradient and the Gauss-Newton…
Can deep reinforcement learning algorithms be exploited as solvers for optimal trading strategies? The aim of this work is to test reinforcement learning algorithms on conceptually simple, but mathematically non-trivial, trading…
Using backpropagation to compute gradients of objective functions for optimization has remained a mainstay of machine learning. Backpropagation, or reverse-mode differentiation, is a special case within the general family of automatic…