Related papers: Beyond the Policy Gradient Theorem for Efficient P…
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:…
In the pursuit of finding an optimal policy, reinforcement learning (RL) methods generally ignore the properties of learned policies apart from their expected return. Thus, even when successful, it is difficult to characterize which…
Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…
Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value…
Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…
Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…
The policy gradient theorem states that the policy should only be updated in states that are visited by the current policy, which leads to insufficient planning in the off-policy states, and thus to convergence to suboptimal policies. We…
In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…
Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…
With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…
Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…
The policy gradient theorem gives a convenient form of the policy gradient in terms of three factors: an action value, a gradient of the action likelihood, and a state distribution involving discounting called the \emph{discounted…
We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…
A fundamental challenge in multiagent reinforcement learning is to learn beneficial behaviors in a shared environment with other simultaneously learning agents. In particular, each agent perceives the environment as effectively…
This paper presents an approach for data-driven policy refinement in reinforcement learning, specifically designed for safety-critical applications. Our methodology leverages the strengths of data-driven optimization and reinforcement…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…