Related papers: Faster Policy Learning with Continuous-Time Gradie…
We study the use of policy gradient algorithms to optimize over a class of generalized Thompson sampling policies. Our central insight is to view the posterior parameter sampled by Thompson sampling as a kind of pseudo-action. Policy…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm PPG (Proximal Policy Gradient), which is close to both VPG (vanilla policy gradient) and PPO (proximal policy optimization). The PPG objective is a partial variation of the VPG objective and the…
Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…
This paper deploys the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm for longitudinal and lateral control of a simulated car to solve a path following task. The DDPG agent was implemented using PyTorch and trained and evaluated on a…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
Back-propagation is a popular machine learning algorithm that uses gradient descent in training neural networks for supervised learning, but can be very slow. A number of algorithms have been developed to speed up convergence and improve…
We present foundations for using Model Predictive Control (MPC) as a differentiable policy class for reinforcement learning in continuous state and action spaces. This provides one way of leveraging and combining the advantages of…
We develop a mathematical framework for solving multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) problems based on a type of policy gradient method. The goal in MTRL is to learn a common policy that operates effectively in different environments;…
Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…
This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…
In sequence generation task, many works use policy gradient for model optimization to tackle the intractable backpropagation issue when maximizing the non-differentiable evaluation metrics or fooling the discriminator in adversarial…
We consider deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) in the context of reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. To enhance exploration, we introduce a search procedure, \emph{${\epsilon}{t}$-greedy}, which generates exploratory options…
Coagent policy gradient algorithms (CPGAs) are reinforcement learning algorithms for training a class of stochastic neural networks called coagent networks. In this work, we prove that CPGAs converge to locally optimal policies.…
We introduce a novel training procedure for policy gradient methods wherein episodic memory is used to optimize the hyperparameters of reinforcement learning algorithms on-the-fly. Unlike other hyperparameter searches, we formulate…
Many problems at the intersection of combinatorics and computer science require solving for a permutation that optimally matches, ranks, or sorts some data. These problems usually have a task-specific, often non-differentiable objective…
The ability of Gaussian processes (GPs) to predict the behavior of dynamical systems as a more sample-efficient alternative to parametric models seems promising for real-world robotics research. However, the computational complexity of GPs…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems,…
This paper is concerned with the training of recurrent neural networks as goal-oriented dialog agents using reinforcement learning. Training such agents with policy gradients typically requires a large amount of samples. However, the…