Related papers: Zeroth-Order Supervised Policy Improvement
Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a target policy with data generated by other policies. Most previous OPE methods focus on precisely estimating the true performance of a policy. We observe that in many applications, (1) the end…
Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and…
Reinforcement learning for control over continuous spaces typically uses high-entropy stochastic policies, such as Gaussian distributions, for local exploration and estimating policy gradient to optimize performance. Many robotic control…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
This paper addresses the problem of model-free reinforcement learning for Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) with large state spaces. The goal of the RMDP framework is to find a policy that is robust against the parameter uncertainties…
Natural policy gradient methods are popular reinforcement learning methods that improve the stability of policy gradient methods by utilizing second-order approximations to precondition the gradient with the inverse of the…
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
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…
Reinforcement learning is a general technique that allows an agent to learn an optimal policy and interact with an environment in sequential decision making problems. The goodness of a policy is measured by its value function starting from…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient…
Off-Policy reinforcement learning (RL) is an important class of methods for many problem domains, such as robotics, where the cost of collecting data is high and on-policy methods are consequently intractable. Standard methods for applying…
The increasing computational and memory demands in deep learning present significant challenges, especially in resource-constrained environments. We introduce a zero-order quantized optimization (ZOQO) method designed for training models…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…
We adapt reinforcement learning (RL) methods for continuous control to bridge the gap between complete ignorance and perfect knowledge of the environment. Our method, Partial Knowledge Least Squares Policy Iteration (PLSPI), takes…
The recent success of reinforcement learning's (RL) in solving complex tasks is most often attributed to its capacity to explore and exploit an environment where it has been trained. Sample efficiency is usually not an issue since cheap…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…
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…