Related papers: A Policy Gradient Algorithm for the Risk-Sensitive…
Managing risk in dynamic decision problems is of cardinal importance in many fields such as finance and process control. The most common approach to defining risk is through various variance related criteria such as the Sharpe Ratio or the…
There are no computationally feasible algorithms that provide solutions to the finite horizon Risk-sensitive Constrained Markov Decision Process (Risk-CMDP) problem, even for problems with moderate horizon. With an aim to design the same,…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and risk-sensitive MDPs are both powerful tools for making decisions in the presence of uncertainties. Previous efforts have aimed to establish their connections, revealing equivalences in specific…
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 present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…
Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…
This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself…
Gradient-based approaches to direct policy search in reinforcement learning have received much recent attention as a means to solve problems of partial observability and to avoid some of the problems associated with policy degradation in…
In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…
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…
Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…
We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…
Modified policy iteration (MPI) is a dynamic programming algorithm that combines elements of policy iteration and value iteration. The convergence of MPI has been well studied in the context of discounted and average-cost MDPs. In this…