Related papers: Balancing Value Underestimation and Overestimation…
We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…
Approximation of the value functions in value-based deep reinforcement learning induces overestimation bias, resulting in suboptimal policies. We show that when the reinforcement signals received by the agents have a high variance, deep…
Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: high sample…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving complex decision-making and control tasks. However, many model-free RL algorithms experience performance degradation due to inaccurate value estimation, particularly the…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…
We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…
Value-based algorithms are a cornerstone of off-policy reinforcement learning due to their simplicity and training stability. However, their use has traditionally been restricted to discrete action spaces, as they rely on estimating…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven a powerful technique in many sequential decision making domains. However, Robotics poses many challenges for RL, most notably training on a physical system can be expensive and dangerous, which…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware…
It is a popular belief that model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL, but in practice, it is not always true due to overweighed model errors. In complex and noisy settings, model-based RL tends to…
Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm, essentially based on entropy regularization. SAC trains a policy by maximizing the trade-off between expected return and entropy (randomness in the…
This paper introduces a novel reinforcement learning (RL) strategy designed to facilitate rapid autonomy transfer by utilizing pre-trained critic value functions from multiple environments. Unlike traditional methods that require extensive…
Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…
Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms, which aim to learn a model of the environment to make decisions, are more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts. The sample efficiency of model-based approaches relies on whether…
Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…
Offline Reinforcement Learning promises to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without the need for exploration. However, existing Q-learning and actor-critic based off-policy RL algorithms fail when…
Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…
In reinforcement learning (RL), function approximation errors are known to easily lead to the Q-value overestimations, thus greatly reducing policy performance. This paper presents a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm, which…