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Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample…
Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…
We derive a policy gradient theorem for Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) objectives in finite-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL), generalizing the standard policy gradient theorem and encompassing distortion-based risk objectives as…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
This work adopts the very successful distributional perspective on reinforcement learning and adapts it to the continuous control setting. We combine this within a distributed framework for off-policy learning in order to develop what we…
Feedback optimization is an increasingly popular control paradigm to optimize dynamical systems, accounting for control objectives that concern the system operation at steady-state. Existing feedback optimization techniques heavily rely on…
We apply diffusion strategies to develop a fully-distributed cooperative reinforcement learning algorithm in which agents in a network communicate only with their immediate neighbors to improve predictions about their environment. The…
Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) has been used to mitigate the computational complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) by employing an exponentially weighted estimation of the advantage function to reduce the variance in policy…
Model-based offline reinforcement learning trains policies using pre-collected datasets and learned environment models, eliminating the need for direct real-world environment interaction. However, this paradigm is inherently challenged by…
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…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet current methods face key challenges in resource allocation and policy optimization dynamics: (i) uniform rollout…
Recent studies have shown that fractional calculus is an effective alternative mathematical tool in various scientific fields. However, some investigations indicate that results established in differential and integral calculus do not…
Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…
Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…
Solutions of optimization problems, including policy optimization in reinforcement learning, typically rely upon some variant of gradient descent. There has been much recent work in the machine learning, control, and optimization…
Discount regularization, using a shorter planning horizon when calculating the optimal policy, is a popular choice to restrict planning to a less complex set of policies when estimating an MDP from sparse or noisy data (Jiang et al., 2015).…
Distribution shift is a major obstacle in offline reinforcement learning, which necessitates minimizing the discrepancy between the learned policy and the behavior policy to avoid overestimating rare or unseen actions. Previous conservative…
Today's massively-sized datasets have made it necessary to often perform computations on them in a distributed manner. In principle, a computational task is divided into subtasks which are distributed over a cluster operated by a…
Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In…
This paper introduces PG-Rainbow, a novel algorithm that incorporates a distributional reinforcement learning framework with a policy gradient algorithm. Existing policy gradient methods are sample inefficient and rely on the mean of…