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We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…
The actor-critic (AC) algorithm is a popular method to find an optimal policy in reinforcement learning. In the infinite horizon scenario, the finite-sample convergence rate for the AC and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms has been…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and…
Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
We prove that a single-layer neural network trained with the online actor critic algorithm converges in distribution to a random ordinary differential equation (ODE) as the number of hidden units and the number of training steps…
This paper provides the details of implementing two important policy gradient methods to solve the inverted pendulum problem. These are namely the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)…
Pretraining with expert demonstrations have been found useful in speeding up the training process of deep reinforcement learning algorithms since less online simulation data is required. Some people use supervised learning to speed up the…
In this paper, we establish last-iterate convergence rates for off-policy actor--critic methods in reinforcement learning. In particular, under a single-loop, single-timescale implementation and a broad class of policy updates, including…
In performative Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent faces a policy-dependent environment: the reward and transition functions depend on the agent's policy. Prior work on performative RL has studied the convergence of repeated retraining…
Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…
We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…
The average reward criterion is relatively less studied as most existing works in the Reinforcement Learning literature consider the discounted reward criterion. There are few recent works that present on-policy average reward actor-critic…
Constrained reinforcement learning has achieved promising progress in safety-critical fields where both rewards and constraints are considered. However, constrained reinforcement learning methods face challenges in striking the right…
In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies…
The hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…
We study the roots of algorithmic progress in deep policy gradient algorithms through a case study on two popular algorithms: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO). Specifically, we investigate the…
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…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a ubiquitous on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm but is significantly less utilized than off-policy learning algorithms in multi-agent settings. This is often due to the belief that PPO is…