Related papers: A Stochastic Trust-Region Framework for Policy Opt…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…
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.…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…
We propose a novel framework for analyzing convergence rates of stochastic optimization algorithms with adaptive step sizes. This framework is based on analyzing properties of an underlying generic stochastic process, in particular by…
A trust-region algorithm is presented for finding approximate minimizers of smooth unconstrained functions whose values and derivatives are subject to random noise. It is shown that, under suitable probabilistic assumptions, the new method…
We consider minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the (possibly stochastic) gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, imitation learning and adversarial training. Our target optimization framework…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
We consider the problem of steering a system with unknown, stochastic dynamics to satisfy a rich, temporally layered task given as a signal temporal logic formula. We represent the system as a Markov decision process in which the states are…
In recent years, trust region on-policy reinforcement learning has achieved impressive results in addressing complex control tasks and gaming scenarios. However, contemporary state-of-the-art algorithms within this category primarily…
This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…
In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…
Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…
Classical trust region methods were designed to solve problems in which function and gradient information are exact. This paper considers the case when there are bounded errors (or noise) in the above computations and proposes a simple…
This paper proposes a random subspace trust-region algorithm for general convex-constrained derivative-free optimization (DFO) problems. Similar to previous random subspace DFO methods, the convergence of our algorithm requires a certain…
As the operations of autonomous systems generally affect simultaneously several users, it is crucial that their designs account for fairness considerations. In contrast to standard (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), we investigate the…
Algorithmic recommendations and decisions have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many of these data-driven policies, especially in the realm of public policy, are based on known, deterministic rules to ensure their transparency and…
Trust region methods are widely applied in single-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their monotonic performance-improvement guarantee at every iteration. Nonetheless, when applied in multi-agent settings, the guarantee of trust…
Nowadays stochastic approximation methods are one of the major research direction to deal with the large-scale machine learning problems. From stochastic first order methods, now the focus is shifting to stochastic second order methods due…
Supervised approaches for text summarisation suffer from the problem of mismatch between the target labels/scores of individual sentences and the evaluation score of the final summary. Reinforcement learning can solve this problem by…