Related papers: Functional Acceleration for Policy Mirror Descent
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…
Policy evaluation with linear function approximation is an important problem in reinforcement learning. When facing high-dimensional feature spaces, such a problem becomes extremely hard considering the computation efficiency and quality of…
Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL). Under a generative sampling model, these methods can achieve sharper sample complexity than policy…
This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…
This work addresses distributed optimization, where a network of agents wants to minimize a global strongly convex objective function. The global function can be written as a sum of local convex functions, each of which is associated with…
In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…
Standard RL algorithms assume fixed environment dynamics and require a significant amount of interaction to adapt to new environments. We introduce Policy-Dynamics Value Functions (PD-VF), a novel approach for rapidly adapting to dynamics…
Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding…
Many of the recent trajectory optimization algorithms alternate between linear approximation of the system dynamics around the mean trajectory and conservative policy update. One way of constraining the policy change is by bounding the…
In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attention in control engineering. Especially, policy gradient methods are widely used. In this work, we improve the tracking performance of proximal policy optimization…
Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) excels in various domains but lacks generalizability and interpretability. On the other hand, programmatic RL methods (Trivedi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023) reformulate RL tasks as synthesizing…
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…
Many large MDPs can be represented compactly using a dynamic Bayesian network. Although the structure of the value function does not retain the structure of the process, recent work has shown that value functions in factored MDPs can often…
Data augmentation methods are indispensable heuristics to boost the performance of deep neural networks, especially in image recognition tasks. Recently, several studies have shown that augmentation strategies found by search algorithms…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) satisfying \emph{linear Bellman completeness} -- a fundamental setting where the Bellman backup of any linear value function remains…
This paper addresses the challenge of dynamic multi-objective optimization problems (DMOPs) by introducing novel approaches for accelerating prediction strategies within the evolutionary algorithm framework. Since the objectives of DMOPs…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using…
We study the problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with linear function approximation, i.e. assuming the optimal action-value function is linear in a known $d$-dimensional feature mapping. Unfortunately, however, based on only this…
In this paper, a method for recursively computing approximate modal paths is developed. A recursive formulation of the modal path can be obtained either by backward or forward dynamic programming. By combining both methods, a ``two-filter''…