相关论文: Variance Reduction for Policy Gradient with Action…
When designing algorithms for finite-time-horizon episodic reinforcement learning problems, a common approach is to introduce a fictitious discount factor and use stationary policies for approximations. Empirically, it has been shown that…
The empirical success of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has motivated the search for more efficient and scalable algorithms for large scale multi-agent systems. However, existing state-of-the-art algorithms do not fully exploit…
The task of estimating the gradient of a function in the presence of noise is central to several forms of reinforcement learning, including policy search methods. We present two techniques for reducing gradient estimation errors in the…
In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…
Learning task-oriented dialog policies via reinforcement learning typically requires large amounts of interaction with users, which in practice renders such methods unusable for real-world applications. In order to reduce the data…
Due to the high variance of policy gradients, on-policy optimization algorithms are plagued with low sample efficiency. In this work, we propose Augment-Reinforce-Merge (ARM) policy gradient estimator as an unbiased low-variance alternative…
This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…
While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
Transferring reinforcement learning policies trained in physics simulation to the real hardware remains a challenge, known as the "sim-to-real" gap. Domain randomization is a simple yet effective technique to address dynamics discrepancies…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large reasoning models (LRMs) using policy-gradient methods such as GRPO. To stabilize training, these methods typically center…
We study variance-dependent regret bounds for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Algorithms with variance-dependent regret guarantees can automatically exploit environments with low variance (e.g., enjoying constant regret on deterministic…
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,…
In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…
Policy gradient methods are notorious for having a large variance and high sample complexity. To mitigate this, we introduce SoftTreeMax -- a generalization of softmax that employs planning. In SoftTreeMax, we extend the traditional logits…
The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…
We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…
An ongoing challenge in neural information processing is: how do neurons adjust their connectivity to improve task performance over time (i.e., actualize learning)? It is widely believed that there is a consistent, synaptic-level learning…