Related papers: Stabilizing Q Learning Via Soft Mellowmax Operator
The impact of softmax on the value function itself in reinforcement learning (RL) is often viewed as problematic because it leads to sub-optimal value (or Q) functions and interferes with the contraction properties of the Bellman operator.…
Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…
A softmax operator applied to a set of values acts somewhat like the maximization function and somewhat like an average. In sequential decision making, softmax is often used in settings where it is necessary to maximize utility but also to…
$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. It is widely believed that $Q$-learning with linear function approximation (i.e., linear $Q$-learning) suffers from possible divergence until the recent work…
Tackling overestimation in $Q$-learning is an important problem that has been extensively studied in single-agent reinforcement learning, but has received comparatively little attention in the multi-agent setting. In this work, we…
The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…
The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…
We study the convergence of $Q$-learning with linear function approximation. Our key contribution is the introduction of a novel multi-Bellman operator that extends the traditional Bellman operator. By exploring the properties of this…
In Reinforcement Learning the Q-learning algorithm provably converges to the optimal solution. However, as others have demonstrated, Q-learning can also overestimate the values and thereby spend too long exploring unhelpful states. Double…
Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…
Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…
Fitted $Q$-iteration (FQI) and soft FQI are widely used value-based methods for offline reinforcement learning, but their standard stability guarantees often depend on Bellman completeness, a strong closure condition that can fail under…
Soft Q-learning is a variation of Q-learning designed to solve entropy regularized Markov decision problems where an agent aims to maximize the entropy regularized value function. Despite its empirical success, there have been limited…
The softmax function is a basic operator in machine learning and optimization, used in classification, attention mechanisms, reinforcement learning, game theory, and problems involving log-sum-exp terms. Existing robustness guarantees of…
Value decomposition is a core approach for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, existing methods still rely on a single optimal action and struggle to adapt when the underlying value function shifts during…
Value function estimation is an important task in reinforcement learning, i.e., prediction. The Boltzmann softmax operator is a natural value estimator and can provide several benefits. However, it does not satisfy the non-expansion…
In a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP), the objective is to find the optimal value function, i.e., the value function corresponding to an optimal policy. This problem reduces to solving a functional equation known as the…
A soft-max function has two main efficiency measures: (1) approximation - which corresponds to how well it approximates the maximum function, (2) smoothness - which shows how sensitive it is to changes of its input. Our goal is to identify…
SoftMax is a ubiquitous ingredient of modern machine learning algorithms. It maps an input vector onto a probability simplex and reweights the input by concentrating the probability mass at large entries. Yet, as a smooth approximation to…
Enabling machine learning classifiers to defer their decision to a downstream expert when the expert is more accurate will ensure improved safety and performance. This objective can be achieved with the learning-to-defer framework which…