English
Related papers

Related papers: A policy gradient approach for optimization of smo…

200 papers

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has become a popular tool for controlling the risk of uncertain outcomes and ensuring reliable performance in highly stochastic sequential decision-making problems. While it has been shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xian Yu , Lei Ying

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Tingting Zhao , Hirotaka Hachiya , Voot Tangkaratt , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Reazul Hasan Russel , Bahram Behzadian , Marek Petrik

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

This paper presents a constrained policy gradient algorithm. We introduce constraints for safe learning with the following steps. First, learning is slowed down (lazy learning) so that the episodic policy change can be computed with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-24 Balázs Varga , Balázs Kulcsár , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Navdeep Kumar , Esther Derman , Matthieu Geist , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Shalabh Bhatnagar

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Dotan Di Castro , Aviv Tamar , Shie Mannor

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL), a crucial field due to its ability to enhance decision-making in scenarios where it is essential to manage uncertainty and minimize potential adverse outcomes. Particularly, our work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Dake Zhang , Boxiang Lyu , Shuang Qiu , Mladen Kolar , Tong Zhang

Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shangding Gu , Bilgehan Sel , Yuhao Ding , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Ming Jin , Alois Knoll

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Pulkit Katdare , Anant Joshi , Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

A promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to constrain the learned policy to stay close to the dataset behaviors, known as policy constraint offline RL. However, existing works heavily rely on the purity of the data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Liu Liu , Deheng Ye , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

Modern navigation algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning (RL) show promising efficiency and robustness. However, most deep RL algorithms operate in a risk-neutral manner, making no special attempt to shield users from relatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Jinyoung Choi , Christopher R. Dance , Jung-eun Kim , Seulbin Hwang , Kyung-sik Park

The development of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has introduced a natural way to incorporate risk sensitivity into value-based and actor-critic methods by employing risk measures other than expectation in the value function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar