Related papers: Structure Matters: Dynamic Policy Gradient
Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…
We study robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) with general policy parameterization under s-rectangular and non-rectangular uncertainty sets. Prior work is largely limited to tabular policies, and hence either lacks sample complexity…
Many sequential decision problems can be formulated as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the optimal value function (or cost-to-go function) can be shown to satisfy a monotone structure in some or all of its dimensions. When the state…
Structural results impose sufficient conditions on the model parameters of a Markov decision process (MDP) so that the optimal policy is an increasing function of the underlying state. The classical assumptions for MDP structural results…
This paper presents a scalable and fault-tolerant framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission management in complex and uncertain environments. The proposed approach addresses the computational bottleneck inherent in solving…
Modern policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning, such as TRPO and PPO, owe their success to the use of parameterized policies. However, while theoretical guarantees have been established for this class of algorithms, especially…
We study model-based reinforcement learning with non-linear function approximation where the transition function of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP) is given by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. We develop a provably efficient…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs). For this purpose, some variant of Stochastic Mirror Descent is proposed for convex programming problems with Lipschitz-continuous…
We adopt an optimal-control framework for addressing the undiscounted infinite-horizon discrete-time restless $N$-armed bandit problem. Unlike most studies that rely on constructing policies based on the relaxed single-armed Markov Decision…
This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself…
This paper introduces a differential dynamic programming (DDP) based framework for polynomial trajectory generation for differentially flat systems. In particular, instead of using a linear equation with increasing size to represent…
We make three contributions toward better understanding policy gradient methods in the tabular setting. First, we show that with the true gradient, policy gradient with a softmax parametrization converges at a $O(1/t)$ rate, with constants…
In modern robotics, effectively computing optimal control policies under dynamically varying environments poses substantial challenges to the off-the-shelf parametric policy gradient methods, such as the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient…
While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…
Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs) arise in a variety of applications including target tracking, control of multi-robot swarms, and multiplayer games. A key challenge in MMDPs occurs when the state and action spaces grow…
Q-learning is a popular reinforcement learning algorithm. This algorithm has however been studied and analysed mainly in the infinite horizon setting. There are several important applications which can be modeled in the framework of finite…
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…
Memory-Bounded Dynamic Programming (MBDP) has proved extremely effective in solving decentralized POMDPs with large horizons. We generalize the algorithm and improve its scalability by reducing the complexity with respect to the number of…
We prove the stability and global convergence of a coupled actor-critic gradient flow for infinite-horizon and entropy-regularised Markov decision processes (MDPs) in continuous state and action space with linear function approximation…
In this paper, we consider an integrated MSP-MDP framework which captures features of Markov decision process (MDP) and multistage stochastic programming (MSP). The integrated framework allows one to study a dynamic decision-making process…