Related papers: Second-Order Actor-Critic Methods for Discounted M…
We mathematically analyze and numerically study an actor-critic machine learning algorithm for solving high-dimensional Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) partial differential equations from stochastic control theory. The architecture of the…
First-order optimizers are reliable but slow in sharp, anisotropic regions. We study a curvature-adaptive method that periodically sketches a low-rank Hessian subspace via Hessian--vector products and preconditions gradients only in that…
Second-order methods for neural network optimization have several advantages over methods based on first-order gradient descent, including better scaling to large mini-batch sizes and fewer updates needed for convergence. But they are…
In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…
In recommender systems, reinforcement learning solutions have shown promising results in optimizing the interaction sequence between users and the system over the long-term performance. For practical reasons, the policy's actions are…
Robotic manipulation remains challenging for reinforcement learning due to contact-rich dynamics, long horizons, and training instability. Although off-policy actor-critic algorithms such as SAC and TD3 perform well in simulation, they…
In cooperative stochastic games multiple agents work towards learning joint optimal actions in an unknown environment to achieve a common goal. In many real-world applications, however, constraints are often imposed on the actions that can…
Reinforcement learning (RL) actor-critic algorithms enable autonomous learning but often require a large number of environment interactions, which limits their applicability in robotics. Leveraging expert data can reduce the number of…
This paper proposes a step toward approximate Bayesian inference in on-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning. It is implemented through three changes to the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm: (1) applying a ReLU…
Many modern approaches to offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) utilize behavior regularization, typically augmenting a model-free actor critic algorithm with a penalty measuring divergence of the policy from the offline data. In this work,…
This paper proposes GProp, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous policies with compatible function approximation. The algorithm is based on two innovations. Firstly, we present a temporal-difference based method for…
This paper investigates trajectory tracking problem for a class of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with unknown dynamics and constrained inputs. Different from existing policy gradient methods which employ single…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with linear MDPs under the infinite-horizon discounted setting which aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected discounted cumulative reward using a pre-collected dataset. Existing…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…
Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success, yet its deployment in real-world scenarios is often limited by vulnerability to environmental uncertainties. Distributionally robust RL (DR-RL) algorithms have been proposed…
Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…
We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based algorithm to jointly train (1) a trajectory planner and (2) a tracking controller in a layered control architecture. Our algorithm arises naturally from a rewrite of the underlying optimal…
Deep learning regularization techniques, such as dropout, layer normalization, or weight decay, are widely adopted in the construction of modern artificial neural networks, often resulting in more robust training processes and improved…
We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…