Related papers: Logit Dynamics in Softmax Policy Gradient Methods
Approaches to policy optimization have been motivated from diverse principles, based on how the parametric model is interpreted (e.g. value versus policy representation) or how the learning objective is formulated, yet they share a common…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
We propose that unconstrained artificial intelligence obeys a Second Law analogous to thermodynamics, where ethical entropy, defined as a measure of divergence from intended goals, increases spontaneously without continuous alignment work.…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…
The linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem has reemerged as an important theoretical benchmark for reinforcement learning-based control of complex dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces. In contrast with nearly all…
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…
With the outstanding performance of policy gradient (PG) method in the reinforcement learning field, the convergence theory of it has aroused more and more interest recently. Meanwhile, the significant importance and abundant theoretical…
Dynamic logit models are popular tools in economics to measure state dependence. This paper introduces a new method to derive moment restrictions in a large class of such models with strictly exogenous regressors and fixed effects. We…
Real-world control systems require policies that are not only high-performing but also interpretable and robust. A promising direction toward this goal is model-based control, which learns system dynamics and cost functions from historical…
We propose a new policy, called the LP-update policy, to solve finite horizon weakly-coupled Markov decision processes. The latter can be seen as multi-constraint multi-action bandits, and generalize the classical restless bandit problems.…
We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…
We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) provide a promising framework for computing reliable policies in the face of model errors. Many successful reinforcement learning algorithms build on variations of policy-gradient methods, but…
We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often learn policies that achieve the same episodic return yet behave very differently, due to a combination of environmental (random transitions, initial conditions, reward noise) and algorithmic…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…
Projected policy gradient (PPG) is a basic policy optimization method in reinforcement learning. Given access to exact policy evaluations, previous studies have established the sublinear convergence of PPG for sufficiently small step sizes…
This paper proposes a new regularization technique for reinforcement learning (RL) towards making policy and value functions smooth and stable. RL is known for the instability of the learning process and the sensitivity of the acquired…
We consider the problem of learning stabilizable systems governed by nonlinear state equation $h_{t+1}=\phi(h_t,u_t;\theta)+w_t$. Here $\theta$ is the unknown system dynamics, $h_t $ is the state, $u_t$ is the input and $w_t$ is the…