Related papers: Improving Deep Policy Gradients with Value Functio…
With the continuous popularity of deep learning and representation learning, fast vector search becomes a vital task in various ranking/retrieval based applications, say recommendation, ads ranking and question answering. Neural network…
We propose in this work the gradient-enhanced deep neural networks (DNNs) approach for function approximations and uncertainty quantification. More precisely, the proposed approach adopts both the function evaluations and the associated…
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…
We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) often require additional exploration strategies, especially if the actor is of deterministic nature. This work evaluates the use of model-based…
Value approximation using deep neural networks is at the heart of off-policy deep reinforcement learning, and is often the primary module that provides learning signals to the rest of the algorithm. While multi-layer perceptron networks are…
We introduce a learning method called ``gradient-based reinforcement planning'' (GREP). Unlike traditional DP methods that improve their policy backwards in time, GREP is a gradient-based method that plans ahead and improves its policy…
This paper discusses theoretical and experimental aspects of gradient-based approaches to the direct optimization of policy performance in controlled POMDPs. We introduce GPOMDP, a REINFORCE-like algorithm for estimating an approximation to…
Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been successfully applied in several research domains such as robot navigation and automated video game playing. However, these methods require excessive computation and interaction with the…
We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…
With increasing scale in model and dataset size, the training of deep neural networks becomes a massive computational burden. One approach to speed up the training process is Selective Backprop. For this approach, we perform a forward pass…
In continuous action domains, standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms like DDPG suffer from inefficient exploration when facing sparse or deceptive reward problems. Conversely, evolutionary and developmental methods focusing on…
We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…
The objective in a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) problem is to find a policy that optimizes the expected value of a performance metric such as the infinite-horizon cumulative discounted or long-run average cost/reward. In…
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…
Multivariate functions encountered in high-dimensional uncertainty quantification problems often vary most strongly along a few dominant directions in the input parameter space. We propose a gradient-based method for detecting these…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…
This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…
Value functions are central to Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning but their exact estimation suffers from the curse of dimensionality, challenging the development of practical value-function (VF) estimation algorithms. Several…