Related papers: On Linear Convergence of Policy Gradient Methods f…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
Policy gradients in continuous control have been derived for both stochastic and deterministic policies. Here we study the relationship between the two. In a widely-used family of MDPs involving Gaussian control noise and quadratic control…
In this paper, we consider the finite-state approximation of a discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) under the discounted and average cost criteria. Using the linear programming formulation of the constrained discounted…
Reactive (memoryless) policies are sufficient in completely observable Markov decision processes (MDPs), but some kind of memory is usually necessary for optimal control of a partially observable MDP. Policies with finite memory can be…
This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…
Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…
A wide variety of queueing systems can be naturally modeled as infinite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the reinforcement learning (RL) context, a variety of algorithms have been developed to learn and optimize these MDPs. At the…
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…
We provide a new understanding of the stochastic gradient bandit algorithm by showing that it converges to a globally optimal policy almost surely using \emph{any} constant learning rate. This result demonstrates that the stochastic…
Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…
Owing to the growth of interest in Reinforcement Learning in the last few years, gradient based policy control methods have been gaining popularity for Control problems as well. And rightly so, since gradient policy methods have the…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
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…
Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have recently been recognized as a valuable and promising approach to discovering a policy with creditable performance, particularly in the presence of a dynamic environment and estimation errors in…
Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…