Related papers: Value Improved Actor Critic Algorithms
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…
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…
This paper tackles the challenge of learning non-Markovian optimal execution strategies in dynamic financial markets. We introduce a novel actor-critic algorithm based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) to address this issue, with…
Deep Reinforcement Learning is gaining increasing attention thanks to its capability to learn complex policies in high-dimensional settings. Recent advancements utilize a dual-network architecture to learn optimal policies through the…
A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…
Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
How to obtain good value estimation is one of the key problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current value estimation methods, such as DDPG and TD3, suffer from unnecessary over- or underestimation bias. In this paper, we explore the…
We develop a new policy gradient and actor-critic algorithm for solving mean-field control problems within a continuous time reinforcement learning setting. Our approach leverages a gradient-based representation of the value function,…
Deterministic policy gradient algorithms for continuous control suffer from value estimation biases that degrade performance. While double critics reduce such biases, the exploration potential of double actors remains underexplored.…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
To obtain better value estimation in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel algorithm based on the double actor-critic framework with temporal difference error-driven regularization, abbreviated as TDDR. TDDR employs double actors, with…
In Reinforcement Learning, the optimal action at a given state is dependent on policy decisions at subsequent states. As a consequence, the learning targets evolve with time and the policy optimization process must be efficient at…
Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…
Approximation of the value functions in value-based deep reinforcement learning induces overestimation bias, resulting in suboptimal policies. We show that when the reinforcement signals received by the agents have a high variance, deep…