Related papers: Finite-Sample Analysis of Off-Policy Natural Actor…
Natural policy gradient methods are popular reinforcement learning methods that improve the stability of policy gradient methods by utilizing second-order approximations to precondition the gradient with the inverse of the…
Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning. By combining off-policy updates with an actor-critic formulation, SAC achieves…
We study a sequential decision-making problem for a profit-maximizing operator of an autonomous mobility-on-demand system. Optimizing a central operator's vehicle-to-request dispatching policy requires efficient and effective fleet control…
The problem of two-player zero-sum Markov games has recently attracted increasing interests in theoretical studies of multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, for finite-horizon episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs), it…
We study discrete-time mean-field Markov games with infinite numbers of agents where each agent aims to minimize its ergodic cost. We consider the setting where the agents have identical linear state transitions and quadratic cost…
We propose a new objective, the counterfactual objective, unifying existing objectives for off-policy policy gradient algorithms in the continuing reinforcement learning (RL) setting. Compared to the commonly used excursion objective, which…
Temporal-difference (TD) methods learn state and action values efficiently by bootstrapping from their own future value predictions, but such a self-bootstrapping mechanism is prone to bootstrapping bias, where the errors in the value…
Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…
We consider the problem of non-stationary reinforcement learning (RL) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. We model it by a Markov Decision Process with time-varying rewards and transition probabilities, with a variation budget…
Many off-policy prediction learning algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, but it remains unclear which algorithms learn faster than others. We empirically compare 11 off-policy prediction learning algorithms with linear function…
Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These…
We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…
In this work, we present the first finite-time analysis of Q-learning with time-varying learning policies (i.e., on-policy sampling) for discounted Markov decision processes under minimal assumptions, requiring only the existence of a…
We present temporally abstract actor-critic (TAAC), a simple but effective off-policy RL algorithm that incorporates closed-loop temporal abstraction into the actor-critic framework. TAAC adds a second-stage binary policy to choose between…
In this paper, we propose a sampling-based planning and optimal control method of nonlinear systems under non-differentiable constraints. Motivated by developing scalable planning algorithms, we consider the optimal motion plan to be a…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, typically requiring significant manual effort to identify hyperparameters that perform well on a new domain. In this paper, we take a step towards…
We identify a fundamental problem in policy gradient-based methods in continuous control. As policy gradient methods require the agent's underlying probability distribution, they limit policy representation to parametric distribution…
A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…
We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…
Personalized treatment decisions have become an integral part of modern medicine. Thereby, the aim is to make treatment decisions based on individual patient characteristics. Numerous methods have been developed for learning such policies…