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In this paper, we introduce a policy-gradient method for model-based reinforcement learning (RL) that exploits a type of stationary distributions commonly obtained from Markov decision processes (MDPs) in stochastic networks, queueing…
We develop and analyze a procedure for gradient-based optimization that we refer to as stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG). As a member of the SVRG family of algorithms, SCSG makes use of gradient estimates at two scales,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…
Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…
In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…
We aim to develop off-policy DRL algorithms that not only exceed state-of-the-art performance but are also simple and minimalistic. For standard continuous control benchmarks, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which employs entropy maximization,…
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 present the Generalized Policy Gradient (GPG) Theorem, specifically designed for Transformer-based policies. Notably, we demonstrate that both standard Policy Gradient Theorem and GRPO emerge as special cases within our GPG framework.…
In this paper, we revisit and improve the convergence of policy gradient (PG), natural PG (NPG) methods, and their variance-reduced variants, under general smooth policy parametrizations. More specifically, with the Fisher information…
A fascinating aspect of nature lies in its ability to produce a large and diverse collection of organisms that are all high-performing in their niche. By contrast, most AI algorithms focus on finding a single efficient solution to a given…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which updates the model parameters by adding a local gradient times a learning rate at each step, is widely used in model training of machine learning algorithms such as neural networks. It is observed…
The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this…
In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…
Cooperative multi-agent problems often require coordination between agents, which can be achieved through a centralized policy that considers the global state. Multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods are commonly used to learn such…
We consider solving a convex, possibly stochastic optimization problem over a randomly time-varying multi-agent network. Each agent has access to some local objective function, and it only has unbiased estimates of the gradients of the…
We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…
This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…
Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…
Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…