Related papers: Policy Optimization in a Noisy Neighborhood: On Re…
The use of deep neural networks as function approximators has led to striking progress for reinforcement learning algorithms and applications. Yet the knowledge we have on decision boundary geometry and the loss landscape of neural policies…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often learn policies that achieve the same episodic return yet behave very differently, due to a combination of environmental (random transitions, initial conditions, reward noise) and algorithmic…
In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…
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…
Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…
Rather than learning new control policies for each new task, it is possible, when tasks share some structure, to compose a "meta-policy" from previously learned policies. This paper reports results from experiments using Deep Reinforcement…
Road congestion induces significant costs across the world, and road network disturbances, such as traffic accidents, can cause highly congested traffic patterns. If a planner had control over the routing of all vehicles in the network,…
Deep reinforcement learning agents achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of simulated control tasks. However, successful applications to real-world problems remain limited. One reason for this dichotomy is because the learnt…
Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…
Solving inverse problems in physics is central to understanding complex systems and advancing technologies in various fields. Iterative optimization algorithms, commonly used to solve these problems, often encounter local minima, chaos, or…
Entropy regularization is commonly used to improve policy optimization in reinforcement learning. It is believed to help with \emph{exploration} by encouraging the selection of more stochastic policies. In this work, we analyze this claim…
This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…
Guided policy search algorithms have been proven to work with incredible accuracy for not only controlling a complicated dynamical system, but also learning optimal policies from various unseen instances. One assumes true nature of the…
This paper explores the problem of simultaneously learning a value function and policy in deep actor-critic reinforcement learning models. We find that the common practice of learning these functions jointly is sub-optimal, due to an…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning estimates the true environment through a world model in order to approximate the optimal policy. This family of algorithms usually benefits from better sample efficiency than their model-free counterparts.…
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…
Policy networks are a central feature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for continuous control, enabling the estimation and sampling of high-value actions. From the variational inference perspective on RL, policy networks, when…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…
Route planning is essential to mobile robot navigation problems. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been applied to learning optimal planning policies in stochastic environments without prior knowledge. However, existing…
The challenge of mapping indoor environments is addressed. Typical heuristic algorithms for solving the motion planning problem are frontier-based methods, that are especially effective when the environment is completely unknown. However,…