Related papers: Policy Gradient using Weak Derivatives for Reinfor…
We introduce a new approach for comparing reinforcement learning policies, using Wasserstein distances (WDs) in a newly defined latent behavioral space. We show that by utilizing the dual formulation of the WD, we can learn score functions…
Managing risk in dynamic decision problems is of cardinal importance in many fields such as finance and process control. The most common approach to defining risk is through various variance related criteria such as the Sharpe Ratio or the…
Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…
In this paper, we study the global convergence of model-based and model-free policy gradient descent and natural policy gradient descent algorithms for linear quadratic deep structured teams. In such systems, agents are partitioned into a…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…
Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in discrete action space is ubiquitous in real-world applications, but its complexity grows exponentially with the action-space dimension, making it challenging to apply existing on-policy gradient based deep RL…
Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…
In this work, we present a reinforcement learning algorithm that can find a variety of policies (novel policies) for a task that is given by a task reward function. Our method does this by creating a second reward function that recognizes…
In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…
Several researchers have recently investigated the connection between reinforcement learning and classification. We are motivated by proposals of approximate policy iteration schemes without value functions which focus on policy…
Using the policy gradient algorithm, we train a single-hidden-layer neural network to balance a physically accurate simulation of a single inverted pendulum. The trained weights and biases can then be transferred to a physical agent, where…
We propose Fractional Policy Gradients (FPG), a reinforcement learning framework incorporating fractional calculus for long-term temporal modeling in policy optimization. Standard policy gradient approaches face limitations from Markovian…
Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…
Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…
Existing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on an explicit state-action-value function representation, which can be problematic in high-dimensional action spaces due to the curse of dimensionality. This reliance results…
Improving the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning has been a long-standing research problem. In this work, we aim to reduce the sample complexity of existing policy gradient methods. We propose a novel policy gradient algorithm…