Related papers: Faster Policy Learning with Continuous-Time Gradie…
Backpropagation through time (BPTT) is a technique of updating tuned parameters within recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Several attempts at creating such an algorithm have been made including: Nth Ordered Approximations and Truncated-BPTT.…
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.…
We propose a new way of deriving policy gradient updates for reinforcement learning. Our technique, based on Fourier analysis, recasts integrals that arise with expected policy gradients as convolutions and turns them into multiplications.…
In this paper, we propose World Model Policy Gradient (WMPG), an approach to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimates using learned world models (WM's). In WMPG, a WM is trained online and used to imagine trajectories. The imagined…
Quadrotor control policies can be trained with high performance using the exact gradients of the rewards to directly optimize policy parameters via backpropagation-through-time (BPTT). However, designing a fully differentiable reward…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…
In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…
Truncated Backpropagation Through Time (truncated BPTT) is a widespread method for learning recurrent computational graphs. Truncated BPTT keeps the computational benefits of Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) while relieving the need for…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…
We consider a setting involving $N$ agents, where each agent interacts with an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The agents' MDPs differ in their reward functions, capturing heterogeneous objectives/tasks. The…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
We develop policy gradients methods for stochastic control with exit time in a model-free setting. We propose two types of algorithms for learning either directly the optimal policy or by learning alternately the value function (critic) and…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Recently, the impressive empirical success of policy gradient (PG) methods has catalyzed the development of their theoretical foundations. Despite the huge efforts directed at the design of efficient stochastic PG-type algorithms, the…
Sequence-to-sequence architectures built upon recurrent neural networks have become a standard choice for multi-step-ahead time series prediction. In these models, the decoder produces future values conditioned on contextual inputs,…
Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…
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…
An efficient policy search algorithm should estimate the local gradient of the objective function, with respect to the policy parameters, from as few trials as possible. Whereas most policy search methods estimate this gradient by observing…
We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…