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Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…
For continuing environments, reinforcement learning (RL) methods commonly maximize the discounted reward criterion with discount factor close to 1 in order to approximate the average reward (the gain). However, such a criterion only…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is an approach that enables RL agents to learn from preference, which is particularly useful when formulating a reward function is challenging. Existing PbRL methods generally involve a…
Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…
We consider the problem of scheduling in constrained queueing networks with a view to minimizing packet delay. Modern communication systems are becoming increasingly complex, and are required to handle multiple types of traffic with widely…
The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is about sequential decision making and is traditionally opposed to supervised learning (SL) and unsupervised learning (USL). In RL, given the current state, the agent makes a decision that may influence the next…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…
Reinforcement learning (RL) -- algorithms that teach artificial agents to interact with environments by maximising reward signals -- has achieved significant success in recent years. These successes have been facilitated by advances in…
The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…
Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated great potential in robotic control, where effective exploration is crucial for efficient and high-quality policy learning. However, how to encourage the agent to explore the…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning addresses the problem of inferring an expert's reward function from demonstrations. However, in many applications, we not only have access to the expert's near-optimal behavior, but we also observe part of her…
We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…
We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used…
Standard model-free reinforcement learning algorithms optimize a policy that generates the action to be taken in the current time step in order to maximize expected future return. While flexible, it faces difficulties arising from the…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…