Related papers: Actor-Critic Algorithm for Dynamic Expectile and C…
Offline Reinforcement Learning promises to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without the need for exploration. However, existing Q-learning and actor-critic based off-policy RL algorithms fail when…
This paper studies a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based actor critic (AC) reinforcement learning (RL) technique to control a linear discrete-time system with a quadratic control cost while ensuring a constraint on the…
Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…
This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…
Overestimation is a fundamental characteristic of model-free reinforcement learning (MF-RL), arising from the principles of temporal difference learning and the approximation of the Q-function. To address this challenge, we propose a novel…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a…
Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…
The dynamic portfolio construction problem requires dynamic modeling of the joint distribution of multivariate stock returns. To achieve this, we propose a dynamic generative factor model which uses random variable transformation as an…
Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…
Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These…
The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…
We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient…
Hidden confounders that influence both states and actions can bias policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL), leading to suboptimal or non-generalizable behavior. Most RL algorithms ignore this issue, learning policies from…
Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning are two ends of a spectrum. Learning a good policy without a dynamic model can be prohibitively expensive. Learning the dynamic model of a system can reduce the cost of learning the policy,…
This paper introduces the Active-Importance-Sampling Actor-Critic (AISAC) algorithm, an extension of the Actor-Critic framework for reducing variance in policy gradient estimation. AISAC optimizes the behavior policy to minimize gradient…
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) -- in which agents learn about all the possible long-term consequences of their actions, and not just the expected value -- is of great recent interest. One of the most important affordances of a…
Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is one of the state-of-the-art off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that is within the maximum entropy based RL framework. SAC is demonstrated to perform very well in a list of continous control tasks…
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…
The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…
Model-based representations recently stand out as a promising framework that embeds latent dynamics information into the representations for downstream off-policy actor-critic learning. It implicitly combines the advantages of both…