Related papers: A Self-Tuning Actor-Critic Algorithm
Standard first-order stochastic optimization algorithms base their updates solely on the average mini-batch gradient, and it has been shown that tracking additional quantities such as the curvature can help de-sensitize common…
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…
Self-attention mechanisms are commonly included in a convolutional neural networks to achieve an improved efficiency performance balance. However, adding self-attention mechanisms adds additional hyperparameters to tune for the application…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms are known to be data inefficient. One reason is that a DRL agent learns both the feature and the policy tabula rasa. Integrating prior knowledge into DRL algorithms is one way to improve learning…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the mathematical framework underlying most algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL), are often used in a way that wrongfully assumes that the state of an agent's environment does not change during action…
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…
Reinforcement learning (RL) applications, where an agent can simply learn optimal behaviors by interacting with the environment, are quickly gaining tremendous success in a wide variety of applications from controlling simple pendulums to…
Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…
The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…
We investigate the neural Actor Critic algorithm using shallow neural networks for both the Actor and Critic models. The focus of this work is twofold: first, to compare the convergence properties of the network outputs under various…
Fine tuning distributed systems is considered to be a craftsmanship, relying on intuition and experience. This becomes even more challenging when the systems need to react in near real time, as streaming engines have to do to maintain…
We introduce Learning-Augmented Control (LAC), an approach that integrates untrusted machine learning predictions into the control of constrained, nonlinear dynamical systems. LAC is designed to achieve the "best-of-both-worlds" guarantees,…
Parameter adaptation, that is the capability to automatically adjust an algorithm's hyperparameters depending on the problem being faced, is one of the main trends in evolutionary computation applied to numerical optimization. While several…
In many machine learning tasks, a large general dataset and a small specialized dataset are available. In such situations, various domain adaptation methods can be used to adapt a general model to the target dataset. We show that in the…
Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…
Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…
In computational reinforcement learning, a growing body of work seeks to construct an agent's perception of the world through predictions of future sensations; predictions about environment observations are used as additional input features…
This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…
We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…
Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…