Related papers: Neural Policy Gradient Methods: Global Optimality …
Actor-critic algorithms have shown remarkable success in solving state-of-the-art decision-making problems. However, despite their empirical effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively unexplored, especially with neural…
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,…
Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…
Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…
We study the performance of the gradient play algorithm for stochastic games (SGs), where each agent tries to maximize its own total discounted reward by making decisions independently based on current state information which is shared…
Under mild regularity conditions, gradient-based methods converge globally to a critical point in the single-loss setting. This is known to break down for vanilla gradient descent when moving to multi-loss optimization, but can we hope to…
Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…
We consider numerical approaches for deterministic, finite-dimensional optimal control problems whose dynamics depend on unknown or uncertain parameters. We seek to amortize the solution over a set of relevant parameters in an offline stage…
We study the convergence of the actor-critic algorithm with nonlinear function approximation under a nonconvex-nonconcave primal-dual formulation. Stochastic gradient descent ascent is applied with an adaptive proximal term for robust…
Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…
We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…
In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…
Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…
We propose a neural network approach to model general interaction dynamics and an adjoint based stochastic gradient descent algorithm to calibrate its parameters. The parameter calibration problem is considered as optimal control problem…
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 hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…
The remarkable practical success of deep learning has revealed some major surprises from a theoretical perspective. In particular, simple gradient methods easily find near-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems, and despite…
A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…