Related papers: Trajectory-wise Control Variates for Variance Redu…
Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to either the less…
We propose a method for finding approximate compilations of quantum unitary transformations, based on techniques from policy gradient reinforcement learning. The choice of a stochastic policy allows us to rephrase the optimization problem…
There has been growing interest in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to inventory management, either by optimizing over temporal transitions or by learning directly from full historical demand trajectories. This contrasts sharply with…
Visual tracking is typically solved as a discriminative learning problem that usually requires high-quality samples for online model adaptation. It is a critical and challenging problem to evaluate the training samples collected from…
Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure in financial engineering, energy systems, and supply chain management. In these domains, Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a long-run CVaR criterion effectively mitigate cost…
The use of neural network parametrizations to represent the ground state in variational Monte Carlo (VMC) calculations has generated intense interest in recent years. However, as we demonstrate in the context of the periodic Heisenberg spin…
We consider offline reinforcement learning (RL) in $H$-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where the action-value function of every policy is linear with respect to a given…
This paper is a broad and accessible survey of the methods we have at our disposal for Monte Carlo gradient estimation in machine learning and across the statistical sciences: the problem of computing the gradient of an expectation of a…
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…
The valuation of over-the-counter derivatives is subject to a series of valuation adjustments known as xVA, which pose additional risks for financial institutions. Associated risk measures, such as the value-at-risk of an underlying…
Pre-training for Reinforcement Learning (RL) with purely video data is a valuable yet challenging problem. Although in-the-wild videos are readily available and inhere a vast amount of prior world knowledge, the absence of action…
Risk-averse reinforcement learning (RARL) is critical for decision-making under uncertainty, which is especially valuable in high-stake applications. However, most existing works focus on risk measures, e.g., conditional value-at-risk…
Reinforcement learning (RL) can be formulated as a sequence modeling problem, where models predict future actions based on historical state-action-reward sequences. Current approaches typically require long trajectory sequences to model the…
The actor-critic RL is widely used in various robotic control tasks. By viewing the actor-critic RL from the perspective of variational inference (VI), the policy network is trained to obtain the approximate posterior of actions given the…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…
Many problems involve the use of models which learn probability distributions or incorporate randomness in some way. In such problems, because computing the true expected gradient may be intractable, a gradient estimator is used to update…
Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…
Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…
Advanced vehicle control is a fundamental building block in the development of autonomous driving systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to achieve control performance superior to classical approaches while keeping computational…