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Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) methods, such as Trust Region policy optimization and Proximal policy optimization (PPO), have become the dominant reinforcement learning algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good…
As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…
Mirror descent (MD), a well-known first-order method in constrained convex optimization, has recently been shown as an important tool to analyze trust-region algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). However, there remains a considerable…
Model Predictive Control has been recently proposed as policy approximation for Reinforcement Learning, offering a path towards safe and explainable Reinforcement Learning. This approach has been investigated for Q-learning and actor-critic…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in continuous control due to its robustness and stable training, yet it remains sample-inefficient in tasks with expensive interactions and high-dimensional action spaces. This paper…
Motivated by the recent applications of game-theoretical learning techniques to the design of distributed control systems, we study a class of control problems that can be formulated as potential games with continuous action sets, and we…
In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…
Actor-critic methods have achieved significant success in many challenging applications. However, its finite-time convergence is still poorly understood in the most practical single-timescale form. Existing works on analyzing…
Several recent works have focused on carrying out non-asymptotic convergence analyses for AC algorithms. Recently, a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm has been presented for the discounted cost setting in the look-up table case where the…
The proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm stands as one of the most prosperous methods in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical understanding of PPO remains deficient. Specifically, it is…
Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…
Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…
Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…
Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
Combining off-policy reinforcement learning methods with function approximators such as neural networks has been found to lead to overestimation of the value function and sub-optimal solutions. Improvement such as TD3 has been proposed to…
A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…
Most of reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the discounted criterion which is beneficial to accelerate the convergence and reduce the variance of estimates. Although the discounted criterion is appropriate for certain tasks such as…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…
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…