Related papers: An Analytical Update Rule for General Policy Optim…
We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline…
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…
Multi-task reinforcement learning aims to quickly identify solutions for new tasks with minimal or no additional interaction with the environment. Generalized Policy Improvement (GPI) addresses this by combining a set of base policies to…
Distributed training and increasing the gradient update frequency are practical strategies to accelerate learning and improve performance, but both exacerbate a central challenge: \textit{policy lag}, which is the mismatch between the…
We present an efficient algorithm for model-free episodic reinforcement learning on large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on a novel $Q$-learning policy with adaptive data-driven discretization. The…
We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving…
Supervised approaches for text summarisation suffer from the problem of mismatch between the target labels/scores of individual sentences and the evaluation score of the final summary. Reinforcement learning can solve this problem by…
This paper proposes an off-policy risk-sensitive reinforcement learning based control framework for stabilization of a continuous-time nonlinear system that subjects to additive disturbances, input saturation, and state constraints. By…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is a widely-used algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning. This work offers an alternative perspective of PPO, in which it is decomposed into the inner-loop estimation of update vectors, and the…
This paper proposes a general incremental policy iteration adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm for model-free robust optimal control of unknown nonlinear systems. The approach integrates recursive least squares estimation with…
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…
Trust region methods rigorously enabled reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn monotonically improving policies, leading to superior performance on a variety of tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to multi-agent reinforcement learning…
The stable combination of optimal feedback policies with online learning is studied in a new control-theoretic framework for uncertain nonlinear systems. The framework can be systematically used in transfer learning and sim-to-real…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…
Guided policy search algorithms have been proven to work with incredible accuracy for not only controlling a complicated dynamical system, but also learning optimal policies from various unseen instances. One assumes true nature of the…
We propose to improve trust region policy search with normalizing flows policy. We illustrate that when the trust region is constructed by KL divergence constraints, normalizing flows policy generates samples far from the 'center' of the…
Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…
Being able to seamlessly generalize across different tasks is fundamental for robots to act in our world. However, learning representations that generalize quickly to new scenarios is still an open research problem in reinforcement…
This paper studies the adaptive optimal stationary control of continuous-time linear stochastic systems with both additive and multiplicative noises, using reinforcement learning techniques. Based on policy iteration, a novel off-policy…
Policy learning utilizing observational data is pivotal across various domains, with the objective of learning the optimal treatment assignment policy while adhering to specific constraints such as fairness, budget, and simplicity. This…