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Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…
We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of off-policy policy improvement algorithms with state-action density ratio correction under function approximation setting, where the objective function is formulated as a max-max-min…
Explicit exploration in the action space was assumed to be indispensable for online policy gradient methods to avoid a drastic degradation in sample complexity, for solving general reinforcement learning problems over finite state and…
In current model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, stability criteria based on sampling methods are commonly utilized to guide policy optimization. However, these criteria only guarantee the infinite-time convergence of the…
This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…
This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…
Efficient utilization of the replay buffer plays a significant role in the off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms used for model-free control policy synthesis for complex dynamical systems. We propose a method for…
We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a general class of continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) having smooth Bellman operators. Given access to a generative model, we achieve rate-optimal sample…
Experience replay is a core ingredient of modern deep reinforcement learning, yet its benefits in policy optimization are poorly understood beyond empirical heuristics. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for experience replay…
We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…
We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…
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…
In this work, we present the first finite-time analysis of Q-learning with time-varying learning policies (i.e., on-policy sampling) for discounted Markov decision processes under minimal assumptions, requiring only the existence of a…
In this paper, we study the problem of reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems where communication among agents is limited. We develop a decentralized actor-critic learning framework in which each agent performs several local updates…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and…
Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…
This paper is concerned with the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation in discounted infinite horizon Markov decision processes. We investigate the sample complexities required to guarantee a predefined estimation…