Related papers: Application of variational policy gradient to atom…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a recently proposed particle-based Bayesian inference method, which has attracted a lot of interest due to its remarkable approximation ability and particle efficiency compared to traditional…
Deep Q-learning algorithms often suffer from poor gradient estimations with an excessive variance, resulting in unstable training and poor sampling efficiency. Stochastic variance-reduced gradient methods such as SVRG have been applied to…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) provide a promising framework for computing reliable policies in the face of model errors. Many successful reinforcement learning algorithms build on variations of policy-gradient methods, but…
We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…
We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…
Policy gradient methods are appealing in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimate. To reduce the variance, the state value function is applied commonly. However, the effect of the state value function…
Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…
Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention…
Deep learning, a multi-layered neural network approach inspired by the brain, has revolutionized machine learning. One of its key enablers has been backpropagation, an algorithm that computes the gradient of a loss function with respect to…
We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular and efficient for large-scale reinforcement learning due to their relative stability and incremental nature. In recent years, the empirical success of PG methods has led to the development of a…
This paper tackles the challenge of learning non-Markovian optimal execution strategies in dynamic financial markets. We introduce a novel actor-critic algorithm based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) to address this issue, with…
Controlling a non-statically bipedal robot is challenging due to the complex dynamics and multi-criterion optimization involved. Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for simulation and…
Recent advances in GPU-based parallel simulation have enabled practitioners to collect large amounts of data and train complex control policies using deep reinforcement learning (RL), on commodity GPUs. However, such successes for RL in…
In reinforcement learning, off-policy actor-critic methods like DDPG and TD3 use deterministic policy gradients: the Q-function is learned from environment data, while the actor maximizes it via gradient ascent. We observe that in complex…
Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov…
Reinforcement learning consists of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative long-term reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities and instantaneous rewards. In this paper, we consider the problem…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference algorithm which simulates an interacting particle system to approximately sample from a target distribution, with impressive empirical performance across various…