English
Related papers

Related papers: Bayesian policy gradient and actor-critic algorith…

200 papers

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning algorithms to search for better policies in the parameterized policy space. They do gradient search in the policy space and are known to converge very slowly. Nesterov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-26 K. Lakshmanan

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-04 Deyue Li

Bayesian meta-learning enables robust and fast adaptation to new tasks with uncertainty assessment. The key idea behind Bayesian meta-learning is empirical Bayes inference of hierarchical model. In this work, we extend this framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Yayi Zou , Xiaoqi Lu

Many engineering problems have multiple objectives, and the overall aim is to optimize a non-linear function of these objectives. In this paper, we formulate the problem of maximizing a non-linear concave function of multiple long-term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Qinbo Bai , Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Yunhao Tang , Tadashi Kozuno , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Differential evolution is one of the most prestigious population-based stochastic optimization algorithm for black-box problems. The performance of a differential evolution algorithm depends highly on its mutation and crossover strategy and…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Jianyong Sun , Xin Liu , Thomas Bäck , Zongben Xu

In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Weiya Ren

Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Firas Al-Hafez , Guoping Zhao , Jan Peters , Davide Tateo

Recently, the impressive empirical success of policy gradient (PG) methods has catalyzed the development of their theoretical foundations. Despite the huge efforts directed at the design of efficient stochastic PG-type algorithms, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Anas Barakat , Anastasia Kireeva , Niao He

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Despite the increasing popularity of policy gradient methods, they are yet to be widely utilized in sample-scarce applications, such as robotics. The sample efficiency could be improved by making best usage of available information. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Qingfeng Lan , Samuele Tosatto , Homayoon Farrahi , A. Rupam Mahmood

The policy gradient theorem describes the gradient of the expected discounted return with respect to an agent's policy parameters. However, most policy gradient methods drop the discount factor from the state distribution and therefore do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

A typical process of learning to play a piece on a piano consists of a progression through a series of practice units that focus on individual dimensions of the skill, the so-called practice modes. Practice modes in learning to play music…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Alexandra Moringen , Elad Vromen , Helge Ritter , Jason Friedman

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

Quantum machine learning implemented by variational quantum circuits (VQCs) is considered a promising concept for the noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing era. Focusing on applications in quantum reinforcement learning, we propose a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-07-12 Nico Meyer , Daniel D. Scherer , Axel Plinge , Christopher Mutschler , Michael J. Hartmann

We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sanjeev Manivannan , Shuban V

Natural policy gradient methods are popular reinforcement learning methods that improve the stability of policy gradient methods by utilizing second-order approximations to precondition the gradient with the inverse of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Brennan Gebotys , Alexander Wong , David A. Clausi

Optimizing dynamic risk with stochastic policies is challenging in both policy updates and value learning. The former typically requires transition perturbation, while the latter may rely on model-based approaches. To address these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yudong Luo , Erick Delage

Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Max Qiushi Lin , Reza Asad , Kevin Tan , Haque Ishfaq , Csaba Szepesvari , Sharan Vaswani