Related papers: Discretizing Continuous Action Space with Unimodal…
Hybrid action space, which combines discrete choices and continuous parameters, is prevalent in domains such as robot control and game AI. However, efficiently modeling and optimizing hybrid discrete-continuous action space remains a…
The (conditional or unconditional) distribution of the continuous scan statistic in a one-dimensional Poisson process may be approximated by that of a discrete analogue via time discretization (to be referred to as the discrete…
We present a proximal algorithm that performs a variational recursion on the space of joint probability measures to propagate the stochastic uncertainties in power system dynamics over high dimensional state space. The proposed algorithm…
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with token-level teacher feedback and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning. However, we find that its standard advantage weighted…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
Obstacle avoidance for small unmanned aircraft is vital for the safety of future urban air mobility (UAM) and Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). There are many techniques for real-time robust drone guidance, but many…
In many real-world prediction tasks, class labels contain information about the relative order between labels that are not captured by commonly used loss functions such as multicategory cross-entropy. Recently, the preference for unimodal…
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…
Optimizing discrete diffusion model (DDM) with rewards remains a challenge: the non-autoregressive paradigm makes importance sampling intractable and rollout complex, puzzling reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy…
Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…
For robotic vehicles to navigate robustly and safely in unseen environments, it is crucial to decide the most suitable navigation policy. However, most existing deep reinforcement learning based navigation policies are trained with a…
A learner aims to minimize a function $f$ by repeatedly querying a distributed oracle that provides noisy gradient evaluations. At the same time, the learner seeks to hide $\arg\min f$ from a malicious eavesdropper that observes the…
Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various…
We explore the probabilistic foundations of shared control in complex dynamic environments. In order to do this, we formulate shared control as a random process and describe the joint distribution that governs its behavior. For…
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
One major obstacle that precludes the success of reinforcement learning in real-world applications is the lack of robustness, either to model uncertainties or external disturbances, of the trained policies. Robustness is critical when the…
We study the effect of stochasticity in on-policy policy optimization, and make the following four contributions. First, we show that the preferability of optimization methods depends critically on whether stochastic versus exact gradients…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular deep policy gradient algorithm. In standard implementations, PPO regularizes policy updates with clipped probability ratios, and parameterizes policies with either continuous Gaussian…
We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…