Related papers: Actor-critic is implicitly biased towards high ent…
We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…
Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…
Reinforcement learning (RL) actor-critic algorithms enable autonomous learning but often require a large number of environment interactions, which limits their applicability in robotics. Leveraging expert data can reduce the number of…
The oscillating performance of off-policy learning and persisting errors in the actor-critic (AC) setting call for algorithms that can conservatively learn to suit the stability-critical applications better. In this paper, we propose a…
Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL.…
Having a perfect model to compute the optimal policy is often infeasible in reinforcement learning. It is important in high-stakes domains to quantify and manage risk induced by model uncertainties. Entropic risk measure is an exponential…
In this paper, we consider the problem of deploying a robot from a specification given as a temporal logic statement about some properties satisfied by the regions of a large, partitioned environment. We assume that the robot has noisy…
We make three contributions toward better understanding policy gradient methods in the tabular setting. First, we show that with the true gradient, policy gradient with a softmax parametrization converges at a $O(1/t)$ rate, with constants…
Many of the recent trajectory optimization algorithms alternate between linear approximation of the system dynamics around the mean trajectory and conservative policy update. One way of constraining the policy change is by bounding the…
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 reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…
We study the error introduced by entropy regularization in infinite-horizon discrete discounted Markov decision processes. We show that this error decreases exponentially in the inverse regularization strength, both in a weighted…
Decentralized Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms have been widely utilized for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and have achieved remarkable success. Apart from its empirical success, the theoretical convergence property of decentralized…
The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm with a Gaussian policy has become a mainstream implementation for realizing the Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) objective, which incorporates entropy maximization to encourage…
A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…
In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…
Traditional reinforcement learning methods optimize agents without considering safety, potentially resulting in unintended consequences. In this paper, we propose an optimal actor-free policy that optimizes a risk-sensitive criterion based…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…
We pose an active perception problem where an autonomous agent actively interacts with a second agent with potentially adversarial behaviors. Given the uncertainty in the intent of the other agent, the objective is to collect further…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable performance in numerous sequential decision making and control tasks. However, a common problem is that learned nearly optimal policy always overfits to the training environment and may…