Related papers: Policy gradient methods for ordinal policies
The softmax policy gradient (PG) method, which performs gradient ascent under softmax policy parameterization, is arguably one of the de facto implementations of policy optimization in modern reinforcement learning. For $\gamma$-discounted…
Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
Training a classifier over a large number of classes, known as 'extreme classification', has become a topic of major interest with applications in technology, science, and e-commerce. Traditional softmax regression induces a gradient cost…
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.…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to learn optimal policies with access only to trajectories in a fixed dataset. Policy constraint methods formulate policy learning as an optimization problem that balances maximizing reward…
We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…
In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…
Despite success in many challenging problems, reinforcement learning (RL) is still confronted with sample inefficiency, which can be mitigated by introducing prior knowledge to agents. However, many transfer techniques in reinforcement…
Dynamic decisions are pivotal to economic policy making. We show how existing evidence from randomized control trials can be utilized to guide personalized decisions in challenging dynamic environments with budget and capacity constraints.…
In this work, we show that discretizing action space for continuous control is a simple yet powerful technique for on-policy optimization. The explosion in the number of discrete actions can be efficiently addressed by a policy with…
Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…
While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…
Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…
The field of reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with algorithms for learning optimal policies in unknown stochastic environments. Programmatic RL studies representations of policies as programs, meaning involving higher order…
Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…
Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…
Long-term fairness is an important factor of consideration in designing and deploying learning-based decision systems in high-stake decision-making contexts. Recent work has proposed the use of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to formulate…
Ordinal regression and ranking are challenging due to inherent ordinal dependencies that conventional methods struggle to model. We propose Ranking-Aware Reinforcement Learning (RARL), a novel RL framework that explicitly learns these…
The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…