Related papers: Leveraging the Variance of Return Sequences for Ex…
The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…
Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…
While a powerful and promising approach, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) still suffers from sample inefficiency, which can be notably improved by resorting to more sophisticated techniques to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma.…
Value-based deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the estimation bias primarily caused by function approximation and temporal difference (TD) learning. This problem induces faulty state-action value estimates and therefore…
In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of adjusting the exploration rate when using value-of-information-based exploration. We do this by converting the value-of-information optimization into a problem of finding equilibria of a flow for a…
While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…
Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…
Off-policy sampling and experience replay are key for improving sample efficiency and scaling model-free temporal difference learning methods. When combined with function approximation, such as neural networks, this combination is known as…
We study the use of randomized value functions to guide deep exploration in reinforcement learning. This offers an elegant means for synthesizing statistically and computationally efficient exploration with common practical approaches to…
We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…
Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…
Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…
We approach the continuous-time mean-variance (MV) portfolio selection with reinforcement learning (RL). The problem is to achieve the best tradeoff between exploration and exploitation, and is formulated as an entropy-regularized, relaxed…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, but the vanilla TD can substantially suffer from the inherent optimization variance. A variance reduced TD (VRTD) algorithm was…
To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…
Experience replay is a core ingredient of modern deep reinforcement learning, yet its benefits in policy optimization are poorly understood beyond empirical heuristics. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for experience replay…
Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…