Related papers: Beyond the Policy Gradient Theorem for Efficient P…
The policy gradient theorem is defined based on an objective with respect to the initial distribution over states. In the discounted case, this results in policies that are optimal for one distribution over initial states, but may not be…
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…
Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…
Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…
Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…
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…
Bioprocesses have received a lot of attention to produce clean and sustainable alternatives to fossil-based materials. However, they are generally difficult to optimize due to their unsteady-state operation modes and stochastic behaviours.…
We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…
We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…
For continuing environments, reinforcement learning (RL) methods commonly maximize the discounted reward criterion with discount factor close to 1 in order to approximate the average reward (the gain). However, such a criterion only…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…
Recent policy optimization approaches have achieved substantial empirical success by constructing surrogate optimization objectives. The Approximate Policy Iteration objective (Schulman et al., 2015a; Kakade and Langford, 2002) has become a…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
Having a perfect model to compute the optimal policy is often infeasible in reinforcement learning. It is important in high-stakes domains to quantify and manage risk induced by model uncertainties. Entropic risk measure is an exponential…
Deep reinforcement learning includes a broad family of algorithms that parameterise an internal representation, such as a value function or policy, by a deep neural network. Each algorithm optimises its parameters with respect to an…
Policy gradient methods are a widely used class of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms where a state-dependent baseline is used to reduce gradient estimator variance. Several recent papers extend the baseline to depend on both the…
Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout…
This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…
In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature…