Related papers: Variational Actor-Critic Algorithms
Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or…
This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…
This paper aims at theoretically and empirically comparing two standard optimization criteria for Reinforcement Learning: i) maximization of the mean value and ii) minimization of the Bellman residual. For that purpose, we place ourselves…
We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…
In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…
Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…
Multi-agent actor-critic algorithms are an important part of the Reinforcement Learning paradigm. We propose three fully decentralized multi-agent natural actor-critic (MAN) algorithms in this work. The objective is to collectively find a…
The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
In this paper, we provide finite-sample convergence guarantees for an off-policy variant of the natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithm based on Importance Sampling. In particular, we show that the algorithm converges to a global optimal…
In this paper, we consider discrete-time infinite horizon problems of optimal control to a terminal set of states. These are the problems that are often taken as the starting point for adaptive dynamic programming. Under very general…
A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…
The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…
Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…
We investigate the discounting mismatch in actor-critic algorithm implementations from a representation learning perspective. Theoretically, actor-critic algorithms usually have discounting for both actor and critic, i.e., there is a…
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…
A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…
Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…
This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…
We show that several major algorithms of reinforcement learning (RL) fit into the framework of categorical cybernetics, that is to say, parametrised bidirectional processes. We build on our previous work in which we show that value…