Related papers: Global Convergence Using Policy Gradient Methods f…
This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…
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…
Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…
This paper studies the continuous-time dynamics generated by control-theoretic Lagrangian methods for equality-constrained optimization. In particular, we consider dynamics induced by proportional-integral and feedback linearization…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…
World models paired with model predictive control (MPC) can be trained offline on large-scale datasets of expert trajectories and enable generalization to a wide range of planning tasks at inference time. Compared to traditional MPC…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
Consider a discrete-time Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem solved using policy gradient descent when the system matrices are unknown. The gradient is transmitted across a noisy channel over a finite time horizon using analog…
We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…
Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…
We propose a new technique that boosts the convergence of training generative adversarial networks. Generally, the rate of training deep models reduces severely after multiple iterations. A key reason for this phenomenon is that a deep…
Under mild regularity conditions, gradient-based methods converge globally to a critical point in the single-loss setting. This is known to break down for vanilla gradient descent when moving to multi-loss optimization, but can we hope to…
We develop a mathematical framework for solving multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) problems based on a type of policy gradient method. The goal in MTRL is to learn a common policy that operates effectively in different environments;…
We present a multilevel stochastic gradient descent method for the optimal control of systems governed by partial differential equations under uncertain input data. The gradient descent method used to find the optimal control leverages a…
Despite its nonconvexity, policy optimization for the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) admits a favorable structural property known as gradient dominance, which facilitates linear convergence of policy gradient methods to the globally…
We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) provide a promising framework for computing reliable policies in the face of model errors. Many successful reinforcement learning algorithms build on variations of policy-gradient methods, but…