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Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…
ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning…
We propose a novel hybrid stochastic policy gradient estimator by combining an unbiased policy gradient estimator, the REINFORCE estimator, with another biased one, an adapted SARAH estimator for policy optimization. The hybrid policy…
We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…
Learning in models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high variance gradient estimators. Generally, approaches have relied on control variates to reduce the variance of the REINFORCE estimator. Recent work (Jang et al.…
Many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are impractical for training in operational systems or computationally expensive high-fidelity simulations, as they require large amounts of data. Meanwhile, low-fidelity simulators, e.g.,…
Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…
Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…
In this paper, we consider a problem of learning supervised PageRank models, which can account for some properties not considered by classical approaches such as the classical PageRank algorithm. Due to huge hidden dimension of the…
Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…
This paper develops a policy learning method for tuning a pre-trained policy to adapt to additional tasks without altering the original task. A method named Adaptive Policy Gradient (APG) is proposed in this paper, which combines Bellman's…
Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…
We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…
Despite extreme sample inefficiency, on-policy reinforcement learning, aka policy gradients, has become a fundamental tool in decision-making problems. With the recent advances in GPU-driven simulation, the ability to collect large amounts…
We propose Fractional Policy Gradients (FPG), a reinforcement learning framework incorporating fractional calculus for long-term temporal modeling in policy optimization. Standard policy gradient approaches face limitations from Markovian…
Most statistical software packages implement numerical strategies for computation of maximum likelihood estimates in random effects models. Little is known, however, about the algebraic complexity of this problem. For the one-way layout…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
The high variance issue in unbiased policy-gradient methods such as VPG and REINFORCE is typically mitigated by adding a baseline. However, the baseline fitting itself suffers from the underfitting or the overfitting problem. In this paper,…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…