Related papers: Enhancing Policy Gradient with the Polyak Step-Siz…
Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…
Distributed training and increasing the gradient update frequency are practical strategies to accelerate learning and improve performance, but both exacerbate a central challenge: \textit{policy lag}, which is the mismatch between the…
Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods for finding optimal policies in linear quadratic (LQ) mean field control (MFC) problems over an infinite horizon in continuous time, with common noise and entropy regularization. We study…
Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…
Stepsize selection remains a critical challenge in the practical implementation of distributed optimization. Existing distributed algorithms often rely on restrictive prior knowledge of global objective functions, such as Lipschitz…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient…
Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…
Activities in reinforcement learning (RL) revolve around learning the Markov decision process (MDP) model, in particular, the following parameters: state values, V; state-action values, Q; and policy, pi. These parameters are commonly…
Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
We characterize regions of a loss surface as corridors when the continuous curves of steepest descent -- the solutions of the gradient flow -- become straight lines. We show that corridors provide insights into gradient-based optimization,…
In this work, we propose an adaptive variation on the classical Heavy-ball method for convex quadratic minimization. The adaptivity crucially relies on so-called "Polyak step-sizes", which consists in using the knowledge of the optimal…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a core approach for robot control when expert demonstrations are unavailable. On-policy methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are widely used for their stability, but their reliance on narrowly…
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…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…
Credit assignment in Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is still poorly understood. Existing methods either neglect credit assignment to pre-adaptation behavior or implement it naively. This leads to poor sample-efficiency during…