arXiv research

Proposes ABIDES-Gym for financial markets simulation.

Photonic quantum reinforcement learning for control problems.

Multi-agent Q-learning untangles braids, improving over training.

Online random forests improve Q-learning performance in specific gym environments.

Tool converts industrial systems to RL environments for optimization.

A simple DQN-based multi-agent RL system for binary actions.

RAD enhances RL algorithms with data augmentations.

Study efficient convergence of RL algorithm with function approximation.

MobILE learns from expert demonstrations without access to actions, achieving strong performance guarantees.

Randomly guessing weights helps analyze RL benchmarks objectively.

PettingZoo library accelerates multi-agent reinforcement learning research.

IDAC improves reinforcement learning efficiency by modeling implicit distributions.

Distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) has seen empirical success in complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the setting of nonlinear function approximation. However, there are many different ways in which one can leverage the distributional approach to reinforcement learning. In this paper, we p…

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition caused by the body's response to an infection. In order to treat patients with sepsis, physicians must control varying dosages of various antibiotics, fluids, and vasopressors based on a large number of variables in an emergency setting. In this project we employ a "world model" m…

In this paper, we propose a dual memory structure for reinforcement learning algorithms with replay memory. The dual memory consists of a main memory that stores various data and a cache memory that manages the data and trains the reinforcement learning agent efficiently. Experimental results show that the dual memory …

This project combines recent advances in experience replay techniques, namely, Combined Experience Replay (CER), Prioritized Experience Replay (PER), and Hindsight Experience Replay (HER). We show the results of combinations of these techniques with DDPG and DQN methods. CER always adds the most recent experience to th…

In this paper, the method UCB-RS, which resorts to recommendation system (RS) for enhancing the upper-confidence bound algorithm UCB, is presented. The proposed method is used for dealing with non-stationary and large-state spaces multi-armed bandit problems. The proposed method has been targeted to the problem of the …

Policy optimization on high-dimensional continuous control tasks exhibits its difficulty caused by the large variance of the policy gradient estimators. We present the action subspace dependent gradient (ASDG) estimator which incorporates the Rao-Blackwell theorem (RB) and Control Variates (CV) into a unified framework…

Paper proposes a new RL approach combining IL and RL methods to improve decision-making.

In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies. We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting and propose novel mechanisms to minimize its effects on both the actor and the cr…

We present MDP Playground, a testbed for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with dimensions of hardness that can be controlled independently to challenge agents in different ways and obtain varying degrees of hardness in toy and complex RL environments. We consider and allow control over a wide variety of dimensions, i…

Zap Q-learning is a recent class of reinforcement learning algorithms, motivated primarily as a means to accelerate convergence. Stability theory has been absent outside of two restrictive classes: the tabular setting, and optimal stopping. This paper introduces a new framework for analysis of a more general class of r…

Deep reinforcement learning has shown its success in game playing. However, 2.5D fighting games would be a challenging task to handle due to ambiguity in visual appearances like height or depth of the characters. Moreover, actions in such games typically involve particular sequential action orders, which also makes the…

Deep Reinforcement Learning has enabled the control of increasingly complex and high-dimensional problems. However, the need of vast amounts of data before reasonable performance is attained prevents its widespread application. We employ binary corrective feedback as a general and intuitive manner to incorporate human …

The General Video Game AI (GVGAI) competition and its associated software framework provides a way of benchmarking AI algorithms on a large number of games written in a domain-specific description language. While the competition has seen plenty of interest, it has so far focused on online planning, providing a forward …

Reinforcement learning usually makes use of numerical rewards, which have nice properties but also come with drawbacks and difficulties. Using rewards on an ordinal scale (ordinal rewards) is an alternative to numerical rewards that has received more attention in recent years. In this paper, a general approach to adapt…

We propose a general formulation for addressing reinforcement learning (RL) problems in settings with observational data. That is, we consider the problem of learning good policies solely from historical data in which unobserved factors (confounders) affect both observed actions and rewards. Our formulation allows us t…

TorchBeast is a platform for reinforcement learning (RL) research in PyTorch. It implements a version of the popular IMPALA algorithm for fast, asynchronous, parallel training of RL agents. Additionally, TorchBeast has simplicity as an explicit design goal: We provide both a pure-Python implementation ("MonoBeast") as …

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) is a recent reinforcement learning framework whose success has been supported by various empirical studies. It relies on the key idea of replacing the expected return with the return distribution, which captures the intrinsic randomness of the long term rewards. Most of the e…

In many reinforcement learning tasks, the goal is to learn a policy to manipulate an agent, whose design is fixed, to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. The design of the agent's physical structure is rarely optimized for the task at hand. In this work, we explore the possibility of learning a version of the ag…

Paper introduces SALE for better state-action learning in RL.

This paper addresses the question of how a previously available control policy $π_s$ can be used as a supervisor to more quickly and safely train a new learned control policy $π_L$ for a robot. A weighted average of the supervisor and learned policies is used during trials, with a heavier weight initially on the superv…

Learning from human feedback is a viable alternative to control design that does not require modelling or control expertise. Particularly, learning from corrective advice garners advantages over evaluative feedback as it is a more intuitive and scalable format. The current state-of-the-art in this field, COACH, has pro…

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent explores the environment and collects trajectories into the memory buffer for later learning. However, the collected trajectories can easily be imbalanced with respect to the achieved goal states. The problem of learning from imbalanced data is a well-known problem in supervised…

A novel Q-learning variant reduces underestimation bias in deep actor-critic methods for reinforcement learning.

Predicting movement of objects while the action of learning agent interacts with the dynamics of the scene still remains a key challenge in robotics. We propose a multi-layer Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) autoendocer network that predicts future frames for a robot navigating in a dynamic environment with moving obstacl…

Reinforcement learning (RL) in discrete action space is ubiquitous in real-world applications, but its complexity grows exponentially with the action-space dimension, making it challenging to apply existing on-policy gradient based deep RL algorithms efficiently. To effectively operate in multidimensional discrete acti…

New optimization algorithms on orthogonal group for machine learning.

In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected randomly for replay. However, the achieved goals in the replay buffer are often biase…

This paper proposes an exploration method for deep reinforcement learning based on parameter space noise. Recent studies have experimentally shown that parameter space noise results in better exploration than the commonly used action space noise. Previous methods devised a way to update the diagonal covariance matrix o…

Proposes an amortized variational framework for Deep Q Networks.

We study Imitation Learning (IL) from Observations alone (ILFO) in large-scale MDPs. While most IL algorithms rely on an expert to directly provide actions to the learner, in this setting the expert only supplies sequences of observations. We design a new model-free algorithm for ILFO, Forward Adversarial Imitation Lea…

Active localization is the problem of generating robot actions that allow it to maximally disambiguate its pose within a reference map. Traditional approaches to this use an information-theoretic criterion for action selection and hand-crafted perceptual models. In this work we propose an end-to-end differentiable meth…

The deep Q-network (DQN) and return-based reinforcement learning are two promising algorithms proposed in recent years. DQN brings advances to complex sequential decision problems, while return-based algorithms have advantages in making use of sample trajectories. In this paper, we propose a general framework to combin…

Quantum variational circuits improve reinforcement learning efficiency.

We present a new method of blackbox optimization via gradient approximation with the use of structured random orthogonal matrices, providing more accurate estimators than baselines and with provable theoretical guarantees. We show that this algorithm can be successfully applied to learn better quality compact policies …

Recent networking research has identified that data-driven congestion control (CC) can be more efficient than traditional CC in TCP. Deep reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, has the potential to learn optimal network policies. However, RL suffers from instability and over-fitting, deficiencies which so far rend…

ReF-ER algorithm improved performance in multi-agent reinforcement learning.