Related papers: Momentum-Based Policy Gradient Methods
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…
Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…
The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
In this paper, we consider non-convex multi-block bilevel optimization (MBBO) problems, which involve $m\gg 1$ lower level problems and have important applications in machine learning. Designing a stochastic gradient and controlling its…
This paper presents a novel neural network training approach for faster convergence and better generalization abilities in deep reinforcement learning. Particularly, we focus on the enhancement of training and evaluation performance in…
Sample efficient learning of manipulation skills poses a major challenge in robotics. While recent approaches demonstrate impressive advances in the type of task that can be addressed and the sensing modalities that can be incorporated,…
We explore the use of policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning for quantum control via energy landscape shaping of XX-Heisenberg spin chains in a model agnostic fashion. Their performance is compared to finding controllers using…
The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…
Autonomous learning of robotic skills can allow general-purpose robots to learn wide behavioral repertoires without requiring extensive manual engineering. However, robotic skill learning methods typically make one of several trade-offs to…
In modern robotics, effectively computing optimal control policies under dynamically varying environments poses substantial challenges to the off-the-shelf parametric policy gradient methods, such as the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient…
Sample efficiency is a critical property when optimizing policy parameters for the controller of a robot. In this paper, we evaluate two state-of-the-art policy optimization algorithms. One is a recent deep reinforcement learning method…
Generative robot policies such as Flow Matching offer flexible, multi-modal policy learning but are sample-inefficient. Although object-centric policies improve sample efficiency, it does not resolve this limitation. In this work, we…
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.…
Sampling-based algorithms, which eliminate ''unimportant'' computations during forward and/or back propagation (BP), offer potential solutions to accelerate neural network training. However, since sampling introduces approximations to…
Boosting methods are among the best general-purpose and off-the-shelf machine learning approaches, gaining widespread popularity. In this paper, we seek to develop a boosting method that yields comparable accuracy to popular AdaBoost and…
Stabilizing a dynamical system is a fundamental problem that serves as a cornerstone for many complex tasks in the field of control systems. The problem becomes challenging when the system model is unknown. Among the Reinforcement Learning…
Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…
General-purpose open-domain dense retrieval systems are usually trained with a large, eclectic mix of corpora and search tasks. How should these diverse corpora and tasks be sampled for training? Conventional approaches sample them…