English
Related papers

Related papers: Never Worse, Mostly Better: Stable Policy Improvem…

200 papers

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Hisham Husain , Kamil Ciosek , Ryota Tomioka

Recent studies reveal that a well-trained deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy can be particularly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations on input observations. Therefore, it is crucial to train RL agents that are robust against any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Yongyuan Liang , Yanchao Sun , Ruijie Zheng , Furong Huang

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its ability to solve high dimensional tasks by leveraging non-linear function approximators. However, these successes are mostly achieved by 'black-box' policies in simulated domains. When…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Riad Akrour , Davide Tateo , Jan Peters

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a naturalistic framing for learning through trial and error, which is appealing both because of its simplicity and effectiveness and because of its resemblance to how humans and animals acquire skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Archit Sharma , Kelvin Xu , Nikhil Sardana , Abhishek Gupta , Karol Hausman , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Real-world autonomous decision-making systems, from robots to recommendation engines, must operate in environments that change over time. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown an impressive ability to learn optimal policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Jonathan Clifford Balloch

In reinforcement learning (RL), continuing tasks refer to tasks where the agent-environment interaction is ongoing and can not be broken down into episodes. These tasks are suitable when environment resets are unavailable, agent-controlled,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yi Wan , Dmytro Korenkevych , Zheqing Zhu

We provide a new perspective to understand why reinforcement learning (RL) struggles with robustness and generalization. We show, by examples, that local optimal policies may contain unstable control for some dynamic parameters and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Bing Song , Jean-Jacques Slotine , Quang-Cuong Pham

A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent observes its states through observations, which may contain natural measurement errors or adversarial noises. Since the observations deviate from the true states, they can mislead the agent into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Huan Zhang , Hongge Chen , Chaowei Xiao , Bo Li , Mingyan Liu , Duane Boning , Cho-Jui Hsieh

While agents trained by Reinforcement Learning (RL) can solve increasingly challenging tasks directly from visual observations, generalizing learned skills to novel environments remains very challenging. Extensive use of data augmentation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-10 Nicklas Hansen , Hao Su , Xiaolong Wang

Recent studies have shown that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which raise concerns about applications of DRL to safety-critical systems. In this work, we adopt a principled way and study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Chao Wang

In the past few years, deep reinforcement learning has been proven to solve problems which have complex states like video games or board games. The next step of intelligent agents would be able to generalize between tasks, and using prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Shu-Hsuan Hsu , I-Chao Shen , Bing-Yu Chen

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require guarantees that the agent will perform well in the face of disturbances to the dynamics or reward function. In this paper, we prove theoretically that maximum entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Claas A Voelcker , Marcel Hussing , Eric Eaton , Amir-massoud Farahmand , Igor Gilitschenski

Deep neural policies have recently been installed in a diverse range of settings, from biotechnology to automated financial systems. However, the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the value function leads to concerns on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Ezgi Korkmaz

Achieving robust performance is crucial when applying deep reinforcement learning (RL) in safety critical systems. Some of the state of the art approaches try to address the problem with adversarial agents, but these agents often require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Yeeho Song , Jeff Schneider

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a general-purpose methodology for training inventory policies that can leverage big data and compute. However, off-the-shelf implementations of DRL have seen mixed success, often plagued by high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yaqi Xie , Xinru Hao , Jiaxi Liu , Will Ma , Linwei Xin , Lei Cao , Yidong Zhang