Related papers: A Stochastic Trust-Region Framework for Policy Opt…
We propose a trust-region type method for a class of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems where the objective function is a summation of a (probably nonconvex) smooth function and a (probably nonsmooth) convex function. The model…
We present an algorithm to perform trust-region-based optimization for nonlinear unconstrained problems. The method selectively uses function and gradient evaluations at different floating-point precisions to reduce the overall energy…
The classical problem of maximizing a submodular function under a matroid constraint is considered. Defining a new measure for the increments made by the greedy algorithm at each step, called the discriminant, improved approximation ratio…
There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…
With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…
In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…
The policy gradient theorem is defined based on an objective with respect to the initial distribution over states. In the discounted case, this results in policies that are optimal for one distribution over initial states, but may not be…
In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…
In this work, we present a trust-region optimization framework that employs Hermite kernel surrogate models. The method targets optimization problems with computationally demanding objective functions, for which direct optimization is often…
The objective in a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) problem is to find a policy that optimizes the expected value of a performance metric such as the infinite-horizon cumulative discounted or long-run average cost/reward. In…
We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…
This paper focuses on investigating an inexact stochastic model-based optimization algorithm that integrates preconditioning techniques for solving stochastic composite optimization problems. The proposed framework unifies and extends the…
We propose a framework that can incrementally expand the explanatory temporal logic rule set to explain the occurrence of temporal events. Leveraging the temporal point process modeling and learning framework, the rule content and weights…
Stochastic optimization of continuous objectives is at the heart of modern machine learning. However, many important problems are of discrete nature and often involve submodular objectives. We seek to unleash the power of stochastic…
Game theory serves as a powerful tool for distributed optimization in multi-agent systems in different applications. In this paper we consider multi-agent systems that can be modeled by means of potential games whose potential function…
A widely used technique for improving policies is success conditioning, in which one collects trajectories, identifies those that achieve a desired outcome, and updates the policy to imitate the actions taken along successful trajectories.…
The problem of column subset selection has recently attracted a large body of research, with feature selection serving as one obvious and important application. Among the techniques that have been applied to solve this problem, the greedy…