Related papers: Neural Policy Gradient Methods: Global Optimality …
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…
Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…
We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
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…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular and efficient for large-scale reinforcement learning due to their relative stability and incremental nature. In recent years, the empirical success of PG methods has led to the development of a…
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.…
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 work we study the convergence of gradient methods for nonconvex optimization problems -- specifically the effect of the problem formulation to the convergence behavior of the solution of a gradient flow. We show through a simple…
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…
In this paper, we establish the global optimality and convergence rate of an off-policy actor critic algorithm in the tabular setting without using density ratio to correct the discrepancy between the state distribution of the behavior…
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…
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…
We identify a fundamental problem in policy gradient-based methods in continuous control. As policy gradient methods require the agent's underlying probability distribution, they limit policy representation to parametric distribution…
We study the global convergence of policy gradient for infinite-horizon, continuous state and action space, and entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs). We consider a softmax policy with (one-hidden layer) neural network…