Related papers: Variational Actor-Critic Algorithms
We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…
Applying probabilistic models to reinforcement learning (RL) enables the application of powerful optimisation tools such as variational inference to RL. However, existing inference frameworks and their algorithms pose significant challenges…
We present an actor-critic-type reinforcement learning algorithm for solving the problem of hedging a portfolio of financial instruments such as securities and over-the-counter derivatives using purely historic data. The key characteristics…
We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…
In this paper, we consider the risk-sensitive cost criterion with exponentiated costs for Markov decision processes and develop a model-free policy gradient algorithm in this setting. Unlike additive cost criteria such as average or…
Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…
We propose a new objective function for finite-horizon episodic Markov decision processes that better captures Bellman's principle of optimality, and provide an expression for the gradient of the objective.
We revisit the standard formulation of tabular actor-critic algorithm as a two time-scale stochastic approximation with value function computed on a faster time-scale and policy computed on a slower time-scale. This emulates policy…
Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…
Markov decision problems are most commonly solved via dynamic programming. Another approach is Bellman residual minimization, which directly minimizes the squared Bellman residual objective function. However, compared to dynamic…
Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…
While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
In this paper, we investigate the issue of error accumulation in critic networks updated via pessimistic temporal difference objectives. We show that the critic approximation error can be approximated via a recursive fixed-point model…
We consider infinite horizon dynamic programming problems, where the control at each stage consists of several distinct decisions, each one made by one of several agents. In an earlier work we introduced a policy iteration algorithm, where…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
We describe an approximate dynamic programming approach to compute lower bounds on the optimal value function for a discrete time, continuous space, infinite horizon setting. The approach iteratively constructs a family of lower bounding…
This paper develops an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at recovering a reward function from the observed actions of an agent. We introduce a strategy to flexibly handle different types of actions with two approximations of…
For continuous action spaces, actor-critic methods are widely used in online reinforcement learning (RL). However, unlike RL algorithms for discrete actions, which generally model the optimal value function using the Bellman optimality…
In value-based deep reinforcement learning methods, approximation of value functions induces overestimation bias and leads to suboptimal policies. We show that in deep actor-critic methods that aim to overcome the overestimation bias, if…