Related papers: Second-Order Actor-Critic Methods for Discounted M…
We consider the problem of risk-sensitive control in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. In particular, we aim to find a risk-optimal policy by maximizing the distortion riskmetric (DRM) of the discounted reward in a finite horizon…
Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by their need for an…
In the context of the optimization of Deep Neural Networks, we propose to rescale the learning rate using a new technique of automatic differentiation. This technique relies on the computation of the {\em curvature}, a second order…
Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov…
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 a discounted cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) policy optimization problem, in which an agent seeks to maximize a discounted cumulative reward subject to a number of constraints on discounted cumulative utilities.…
Second-order optimization methods are among the most widely used optimization approaches for convex optimization problems, and have recently been used to optimize non-convex optimization problems such as deep learning models. The widely…
Model-free reinforcement learning methods lack an inherent mechanism to impose behavioural constraints on the trained policies. Although certain extensions exist, they remain limited to specific types of constraints, such as value…
Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…
This paper describes a purely data-driven solution to a class of sequential decision-making problems with a large number of concurrent online decisions, with applications to computing systems and operations research. We assume that while…
Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…
Pretraining with expert demonstrations have been found useful in speeding up the training process of deep reinforcement learning algorithms since less online simulation data is required. Some people use supervised learning to speed up the…
Many real-world control problems, ranging from finance to robotics, evolve in continuous time with non-uniform, event-driven decisions. Standard discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL), based on fixed-step Bellman updates, struggles in…
Off-policy algorithms, in which a behavior policy differs from the target policy and is used to gain experience for learning, have proven to be of great practical value in reinforcement learning. However, even for simple convex problems…
Policy Dual Averaging (PDA) offers a principled Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) framework that more naturally admits value function approximation than standard PMD, enabling the use of approximate advantage (or Q-) functions while retaining…
Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…
There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…
To obtain better value estimation in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel algorithm based on the double actor-critic framework with temporal difference error-driven regularization, abbreviated as TDDR. TDDR employs double actors, with…
Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with learning a rewarding policy by executing another policy that gathers samples of experience. While the former policy (i.e. target policy) is rewarding but in-expressive (in most cases,…