Related papers: Delightful Policy Gradient
Deep Reinforcement Learning is gaining increasing attention thanks to its capability to learn complex policies in high-dimensional settings. Recent advancements utilize a dual-network architecture to learn optimal policies through the…
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…
In this work, we study $\gamma$-discounted infinite-horizon tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) and introduce a framework called dynamic policy gradient (DynPG). The framework directly integrates dynamic programming with (any) policy…
Restricting the variance of a policy's return is a popular choice in risk-averse Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to its clear mathematical definition and easy interpretability. Traditional methods directly restrict the total return…
We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…
In introductory presentations of policy gradients, one often derives the REINFORCE estimator using the full trajectory return and then states, by ``causality,'' that the full return may be replaced by the reward-to-go. Although this…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
We present GradientDICE for estimating the density ratio between the state distribution of the target policy and the sampling distribution in off-policy reinforcement learning. GradientDICE fixes several problems of GenDICE (Zhang et al.,…
This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…
Preference optimization has become a central paradigm for aligning large language models with human feedback. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplifies reinforcement learning from human feedback by directly optimizing pairwise…
Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…
Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…
We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…
We introduce Group Policy Gradient (GPG), a family of critic-free policy-gradient estimators for general MDPs. Inspired by the success of GRPO's approach in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), GPG replaces a learned value…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…
Policy optimization methods have shown great promise in solving complex reinforcement and imitation learning tasks. While model-free methods are broadly applicable, they often require many samples to optimize complex policies. Model-based…
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…
Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…