Related papers: Correcting discount-factor mismatch in on-policy p…
This paper presents an adaptive combination strategy for distributed learning over diffusion networks. Since learning relies on the collaborative processing of the stochastic information at the dispersed agents, the overall performance can…
We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…
Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…
We consider infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted Markov Decision Processes, for which it is known that there exists a stationary optimal policy. We consider the algorithm Value Iteration and the sequence of policies $\pi_1,...,\pi_k$ it…
In federated learning (FL), model training performance is strongly impacted by data heterogeneity across clients. Client-drift compensation methods have recently emerged as a solution to this issue, introducing correction terms into local…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning robotics controllers. It has recently been shown that algorithms based on finite-difference estimates of the policy gradient are competitive with algorithms based on the policy…
Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…
We make three contributions toward better understanding policy gradient methods in the tabular setting. First, we show that with the true gradient, policy gradient with a softmax parametrization converges at a $O(1/t)$ rate, with constants…
Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…
The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…
We present a novel on-policy algorithm for solving stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems. By leveraging the Girsanov theorem, our method directly computes on-policy gradients of the SOC objective without expensive backpropagation…
We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…
We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline…
In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…
We study a networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (NMARL) problem with human feedback in an infinite-horizon setting, where agents interact over an underlying network with localized state dependencies and aim to collaboratively…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…
Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…
Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…
We observe that several existing policy gradient methods (such as vanilla policy gradient, PPO, A2C) may suffer from overly large gradients when the current policy is close to deterministic (even in some very simple environments), leading…