Related papers: SOAC: The Soft Option Actor-Critic Architecture
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Option discovery and skill acquisition frameworks are integral to the functioning of a Hierarchically organized Reinforcement learning agent. However, such techniques often yield a large number of options or skills, which can potentially be…
The options framework is a popular approach for building temporally extended actions in reinforcement learning. In particular, the option-critic architecture provides general purpose policy gradient theorems for learning actions from…
We aim to develop off-policy DRL algorithms that not only exceed state-of-the-art performance but are also simple and minimalistic. For standard continuous control benchmarks, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which employs entropy maximization,…
Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…
Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies are typically implemented with fixed control rates, often disregarding the impact of control rate selection. This can lead to inefficiencies as the optimal control rate varies with task…
Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which have proven their efficacy in diverse domains, especially in solving continuous control problems. Improvement of exploration (action…
In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…
In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…
Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…
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…
Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and…
Reusing previously trained models is critical in deep reinforcement learning to speed up training of new agents. However, it is unclear how to acquire new skills when objectives and constraints are in conflict with previously learned…
We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…
We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many domains, such as video games, recommendation systems and robotic control tasks. In continuous control tasks, widely used policies with Gaussian distributions results…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…
We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…
Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…
Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…