Related papers: Enhancing Policy Gradient with the Polyak Step-Siz…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, typically requiring significant manual effort to identify hyperparameters that perform well on a new domain. In this paper, we take a step towards…
Recent advances in robotic policy learning have enabled complex manipulation in real-world environments, yet the execution speed of these policies often lags behind hardware capabilities due to the cost of collecting faster demonstrations.…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
In this paper, we develop a method for learning a control policy guaranteed to satisfy an affine state constraint of high relative degree in closed loop with a black-box system. Previous reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to satisfy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully used to develop control policies for dynamical systems. For many such systems, these policies are trained in a simulated environment. Due to discrepancies between the simulated…
Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…
Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…
We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
Despite the success achieved by the analysis of supervised learning algorithms in the framework of statistical mechanics, reinforcement learning has remained largely untouched. Here we move towards closing the gap by analyzing the dynamics…
We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…
We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…
Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…
Various acceleration approaches for Policy Gradient (PG) have been analyzed within the realm of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of the widely used momentum-based acceleration method on PG remains largely…
We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…
The field of reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with algorithms for learning optimal policies in unknown stochastic environments. Programmatic RL studies representations of policies as programs, meaning involving higher order…