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A core challenge for an autonomous agent acting in the real world is to adapt its repertoire of skills to cope with its noisy perception and dynamics. To scale learning of skills to long-horizon tasks, robots should be able to learn and…
Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…
Learning expressive stochastic policies instead of deterministic ones has been proposed to achieve better stability, sample complexity, and robustness. Notably, in Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL), the policy is modeled as…
In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…
Actors and critics in actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms are functionally separate, yet they often use the same network architectures. This case study explores the performance impact of network sizes when considering actor and…
The advances in unsupervised object-centric representation learning have significantly improved its application to downstream tasks. Recent works highlight that disentangled object representations can aid policy learning in image-based,…
Visual reinforcement learning is appealing for robotics but expensive -- off-policy methods are sample-efficient yet slow; on-policy methods parallelize well but waste samples. Recent work has shown that off-policy methods can train faster…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques have drawn great attention in many challenging tasks, but their performance deteriorates dramatically when applied to real-world problems. Various methods, such as domain randomization, have been…
Although automatic speech recognition (ASR) task has gained remarkable success by sequence-to-sequence models, there are two main mismatches between its training and testing that might lead to performance degradation: 1) The typically used…
Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…
In model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), most algorithms rely on simulating trajectories from one-step dynamics models learned on data. A critical challenge of this approach is the compounding of one-step prediction errors as length of…
We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…
In this paper, we devise a distributional framework on actor-critic as a solution to distributional instability, action type restriction, and conflation between samples and statistics. We propose a new method that minimizes the Cram\'er…
This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…
Advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have demonstrated data efficiency and optimal control over large state spaces at the cost of scalable performance. Genetic methods, on the other hand, provide scalability but depict hyperparameter…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…
Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…
Quadcopter attitude control involves two tasks: smooth attitude tracking and aggressive stabilization from arbitrary states. Although both can be formulated as tracking problems, their distinct state spaces and control strategies complicate…
While there has been substantial success for solving continuous control with actor-critic methods, simpler critic-only methods such as Q-learning find limited application in the associated high-dimensional action spaces. However, most…
Natural language is often the easiest and most convenient modality for humans to specify tasks for robots. However, learning to ground language to behavior typically requires impractical amounts of diverse, language-annotated demonstrations…