Related papers: Fractal Landscapes in Policy Optimization
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…
Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have achieved great success in solving many challenging tasks while their black-box nature hinders interpretability and real-world applicability, making it difficult for human experts to…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…
We consider a context-dependent Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting, which is characterized by: a) an unknown finite number of not directly observable contexts; b) abrupt (discontinuous) context changes occurring during an episode; and c)…
Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…
Recent studies have shown that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which raise concerns about applications of DRL to safety-critical systems. In this work, we adopt a principled way and study…
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…
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…
In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
Enhancing the diversity of policies is beneficial for robustness, exploration, and transfer in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we aim to seek diverse policies in an under-explored setting, namely RL tasks with structured action…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) uses model-free techniques to optimize task-specific control policies. Despite having emerged as a promising approach for complex problems, RL is still hard to use reliably for real-world applications. Apart…
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…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…
We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…
Standard deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aims to maximize expected reward, considering collected experiences equally in formulating a policy. This differs from human decision-making, where gains and losses are valued differently and…
This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…