Related papers: Neural Policy Gradient Methods: Global Optimality …
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has become a popular tool for controlling the risk of uncertain outcomes and ensuring reliable performance in highly stochastic sequential decision-making problems. While it has been shown that…
Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning have become increasingly prevalent for state-of-the-art performance in continuous control tasks. Novel methods typically benchmark against a few key algorithms such as deep deterministic…
Multi-agent policy-gradient methods have been shown to converge locally near stable Nash equilibria. Local convergence, however, does not determine which equilibrium is reached. We study this question through basin-entry probability with…
This paper presents a model-free approximation for the Hessian of the performance of deterministic policies to use in the context of Reinforcement Learning based on Quasi-Newton steps in the policy parameters. We show that the approximate…
Actor-critic (AC) algorithms, empowered by neural networks, have had significant empirical success in recent years. However, most of the existing theoretical support for AC algorithms focuses on the case of linear function approximations,…
Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) is a popular inverse reinforcement learning approach for jointly optimizing policy and reward from expert trajectories. A primary question about GAIL is whether applying a certain policy…
Recently, the impressive empirical success of policy gradient (PG) methods has catalyzed the development of their theoretical foundations. Despite the huge efforts directed at the design of efficient stochastic PG-type algorithms, the…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…
Being able to fall safely is a necessary motor skill for humanoids performing highly dynamic tasks, such as running and jumping. We propose a new method to learn a policy that minimizes the maximal impulse during the fall. The optimization…
Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…
An open question in the Deep Learning community is why neural networks trained with Gradient Descent generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random data. We propose an approach to answering this question…
Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…
Approaches to policy optimization have been motivated from diverse principles, based on how the parametric model is interpreted (e.g. value versus policy representation) or how the learning objective is formulated, yet they share a common…
Bilevel optimization has witnessed a resurgence of interest, driven by its critical role in trustworthy and efficient AI applications. While many recent works have established convergence to stationary points or local minima, obtaining the…
In this work, we study the problem of finding Pareto optimal policies in multi-agent reinforcement learning problems with cooperative reward structures. We show that any algorithm where each agent only optimizes their reward is subject to…
A major challenge in multi-agent systems is that the system complexity grows dramatically with the number of agents as well as the size of their action spaces, which is typical in real world scenarios such as autonomous vehicles, robotic…
We prove the stability and global convergence of a coupled actor-critic gradient flow for infinite-horizon and entropy-regularised Markov decision processes (MDPs) in continuous state and action space with linear function approximation…
We study the convergence of several natural policy gradient (NPG) methods in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with regular policy parametrizations. For a variety of NPGs and reward functions we show that the…
In this paper, we present a probability one convergence proof, under suitable conditions, of a certain class of actor-critic algorithms for finding approximate solutions to entropy-regularized MDPs using the machinery of stochastic…