Related papers: Analysis of On-policy Policy Gradient Methods unde…
Bioprocesses have received a lot of attention to produce clean and sustainable alternatives to fossil-based materials. However, they are generally difficult to optimize due to their unsteady-state operation modes and stochastic behaviours.…
This paper proposes a novel termination criterion, termed the advantage gap function, for finite state and action Markov decision processes (MDP) and reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating this advantage gap function into the design…
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…
Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
In this paper, we study the global convergence of model-based and model-free policy gradient descent and natural policy gradient descent algorithms for linear quadratic deep structured teams. In such systems, agents are partitioned into a…
The convergence of deterministic policy gradient under the Hadamard parameterization is studied in the tabular setting and the linear convergence of the algorithm is established. To this end, we first show that the error decreases at an…
This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…
Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we…
Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…
This work adopts the very successful distributional perspective on reinforcement learning and adapts it to the continuous control setting. We combine this within a distributed framework for off-policy learning in order to develop what we…
We present a model-based offline reinforcement learning policy performance lower bound that explicitly captures dynamics model misspecification and distribution mismatch and we propose an empirical algorithm for optimal offline policy…
Model-based offline reinforcement learning trains policies using pre-collected datasets and learned environment models, eliminating the need for direct real-world environment interaction. However, this paradigm is inherently challenged by…
We study the use of policy gradient algorithms to optimize over a class of generalized Thompson sampling policies. Our central insight is to view the posterior parameter sampled by Thompson sampling as a kind of pseudo-action. Policy…
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…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
We study learning algorithms when there is a mismatch between the distributions of the training and test datasets of a learning algorithm. The effect of this mismatch on the generalization error and model misspecification are quantified.…
It is vital to learn effective policies that can be transferred to different domains with dynamics discrepancies in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we consider dynamics adaptation settings where there exists dynamics mismatch…
Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning have become increasingly prevalent for state-of-the-art performance in continuous control tasks. Novel methods typically benchmark against a few key algorithms such as deep deterministic…