Related papers: Fractional Policy Gradients: Reinforcement Learnin…
In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…
Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…
Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control…
Standard dynamical systems approaches to economic modeling, such as those deriving the Cobb-Douglas and CES production functions from exponential growth trajectories, typically rely on integer-order differential equations. While effective,…
In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…
As neural networks are increasingly deployed in dynamic environments, they face the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, the tendency to overwrite previously learned knowledge when adapting to new tasks, resulting in severe performance…
Value function approximation is a crucial module for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning when the state space is large or continuous. The present paper takes a generative perspective on policy evaluation via temporal-difference (TD)…
Value approximation using deep neural networks is at the heart of off-policy deep reinforcement learning, and is often the primary module that provides learning signals to the rest of the algorithm. While multi-layer perceptron networks are…
Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…
We propose a computationally efficient approach to safe reinforcement learning (RL) for frequency regulation in power systems with high levels of variable renewable energy resources. The approach draws on set-theoretic control techniques to…
This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…
Safe Reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims at learning optimal policies while staying safe. A popular solution to Safe RL is shielding, which uses a logical safety specification to prevent an RL agent from taking unsafe actions. However,…
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…
Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…
This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…
We propose a framework, called neural-progressive hedging (NP), that leverages stochastic programming during the online phase of executing a reinforcement learning (RL) policy. The goal is to ensure feasibility with respect to constraints…
Reinforcement learning presents an attractive paradigm to reason about several distinct aspects of sequential decision making, such as specifying complex goals, planning future observations and actions, and critiquing their utilities.…
We propose an actor-critic, model-free, and online Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for continuous-state continuous-action Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward is highly sparse but encompasses a high-level temporal…
We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling…