Related papers: Pontryagin-Guided Policy Optimization for Merton's…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely regarded as one of the most successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, known for its robustness and effectiveness across a range of problems. The PPO objective encourages the importance…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) becomes more challenging in the presence of more agents, as the capacity of the joint state and action spaces grows exponentially in the number of agents. To address such a challenge of scale, we…
Improvements in return forecast accuracy do not always lead to proportional improvements in portfolio decision quality, especially under realistic trading frictions and constraints. This paper adopts the Smart Predict--then--Optimize (SPO)…
By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…
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…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…
Coordination of distributed agents is required for problems arising in many areas, including multi-robot systems, networking and e-commerce. As a formal framework for such problems, we use the decentralized partially observable Markov…
In this paper, we study the relationship between general maximum principle and dynamic programming principle for risk-sensitive stochastic optimal control problems, where the control domain is not necessarily convex. The original problem is…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been broadly applied to robotics learning, showcasing stable training performance. However, the fixed clipping bound setting may limit the performance of PPO. Specifically, there is no theoretical…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular and efficient for large-scale reinforcement learning due to their relative stability and incremental nature. In recent years, the empirical success of PG methods has led to the development of a…
Policy gradient methods usually rely on entropy regularization to prevent premature convergence. However, maximizing entropy indiscriminately pushes the policy towards a uniform distribution, often overriding the reward signal if not…
In this paper, we propose a new policy iteration algorithm to compute the value function and the optimal controls of continuous time stochastic control problems. The algorithm relies on successive approximations using linear-quadratic…
This paper focuses on developing Pareto-optimal estimation and policy learning to identify the most effective treatment that maximizes the total reward from both short-term and long-term effects, which might conflict with each other. For…
This thesis investigates Merton's portfolio problem under two different rough Heston models, which have a non-Markovian structure. The motivation behind this choice of problem is due to the recent discovery and success of rough volatility…
Most methods in reinforcement learning use a Policy Gradient (PG) approach to learn a parametric stochastic policy that maps states to actions. The standard approach is to implement such a mapping via a neural network (NN) whose parameters…
We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…
This paper considers the portfolio management problem of optimal investment, consumption and life insurance. We are concerned with time inconsistency of optimal strategies. Natural assumptions, like different discount rates for consumption…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…
Recent advancements in reinforcement learning from human feedback have shown that utilizing fine-grained token-level reward models can substantially enhance the performance of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in aligning large language…