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Related papers: Factored Policy Gradients: Leveraging Structure fo…

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Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-12 Jiacai Liu , Wenye Li , Ke Wei

Policy gradient methods ignore the potential value of adjusting environment variables: unobservable state features that are randomly determined by the environment in a physical setting, but are controllable in a simulator. This can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Supratik Paul , Michael A. Osborne , Shimon Whiteson

Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Gal Dalal , Assaf Hallak , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik

Factored Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a prominent paradigm within the artificial intelligence community for modeling and solving large-scale MDPs whose rewards and dynamics decompose into smaller, loosely interacting components.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-03 Huikang Liu , Wolfram Wiesemann , Man-Chung Yue

Distributed training and increasing the gradient update frequency are practical strategies to accelerate learning and improve performance, but both exacerbate a central challenge: \textit{policy lag}, which is the mismatch between the…

This paper addresses the problem of planning under uncertainty in large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Factored MDPs represent a complex state space using state variables and the transition model using a dynamic Bayesian network. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-10 C. Guestrin , D. Koller , R. Parr , S. Venkataraman

Model predictive control (MPC) faces significant limitations when applied to systems evolving on nonlinear manifolds, such as robotic attitude dynamics and constrained motion planning, where traditional Euclidean formulations struggle with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Peiwen Yang , Weisong Wen , Runqiu Yang , Yuanyuan Zhang , Jiahao Hu , Yingming Chen , Naigui Xiao , Jiaqi Zhao

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

Practitioners designing reinforcement learning policies face a fundamental challenge: translating intended behavioral objectives into representative reward functions. This challenge stems from behavioral intent requiring simultaneous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Bassel El Mabsout , Abdelrahman Abdelgawad , Renato Mancuso

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

Diffusion models have been extensively leveraged for learning robot skills from demonstrations. These policies are conditioned on several observational modalities such as proprioception, vision and tactile. However, observational modalities…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Omkar Patil , Prabin Rath , Kartikay Pangaonkar , Eric Rosen , Nakul Gopalan

Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Muhammad A. Masood , Finale Doshi-Velez

This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Jinchi Chen , Jie Feng , Weiguo Gao , Ke Wei

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

While standard reinforcement learning optimizes a single reward signal, many applications require optimizing a nonlinear utility $f(J_1^\pi,\dots,J_M^\pi)$ over multiple objectives, where each $J_m^\pi$ denotes the expected discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

Fine-grained domain generalization (FGDG) is a more challenging task than traditional DG tasks due to its small inter-class variations and relatively large intra-class disparities. When domain distribution changes, the vulnerability of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Wenlong Yu , Dongyue Chen , Qilong Wang , Qinghua Hu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Many interventions, such as vaccines in clinical trials or coupons in online marketplaces, must be assigned sequentially without full knowledge of their effects. Multi-armed bandit algorithms have proven successful in such settings.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-07 Aidan Gleich , Eric Laber , Alexander Volfovsky

First-order Policy Gradient (FoPG) algorithms such as Backpropagation through Time and Analytical Policy Gradients leverage local simulation physics to accelerate policy search, significantly improving sample efficiency in robot control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Jing Yuan Luo , Yunlong Song , Victor Klemm , Fan Shi , Davide Scaramuzza , Marco Hutter