A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Paper proposes a method for optimizing local policies for trajectory-centric reinforcement learning.
problem Challenges in global policy optimization for non-linear systems and poor performance of open-loop trajectory optimization.
method Formulates trajectory optimization and local policy synthesis as a single optimization problem and solves it as a nonlinear programming instance.
result Demonstrates improved performance of the proposed technique under simplifying assumptions.
In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine them into a composite solution. Our approach builds on mapping this problem into a…
PPO algorithm converges to global optimality in multi-agent reinforcement learning.
problem Designing statistical guarantees for policy optimization methods in multi-agent reinforcement learning.
method Leveraging a multi-agent performance difference lemma, a localized action value function is used as a descent direction for each local policy, leading to a multi-agent PPO algorithm.
result The multi-agent PPO algorithm converges to the globally optimal policy at a sublinear rate under standard regularity conditions.
In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update their local value function estimates independently. Then, we introduce an additional…
We propose to improve trust region policy search with normalizing flows policy. We illustrate that when the trust region is constructed by KL divergence constraints, normalizing flows policy generates samples far from the 'center' of the previous policy iterate, which potentially enables better exploration and helps av…
The paper tackles personalized policy learning from diverse data sources in a federated setting.
problem Learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback across multiple heterogeneous data sources.
method Introduces a novel regret analysis for distinguishing global and local regret, and presents a federated policy learning algorithm using local policies trained with doubly robust offline policy evaluation strategies.
result Establishes finite-sample upper bounds on global and local regret, characterizing them by source heterogeneity and distribution shift.
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently get stuck in local optima. This work addresses these weaknesses by combining re…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum. We mainly use gradient ascent, because it is theoretically well researched. The …
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a booming area of artificial intelligence. Many practical applications of DRL naturally involve more than one collaborative learners, making it important to study DRL in a multi-agent context. Previous research showed that effective learning in complex multi-agent systems demands fo…
Inverse optimal control, also known as inverse reinforcement learning, is the problem of recovering an unknown reward function in a Markov decision process from expert demonstrations of the optimal policy. We introduce a probabilistic inverse optimal control algorithm that scales gracefully with task dimensionality, an…
Policy gradient methods with aggregated states can achieve better performance than approximate policy iteration.
problem Approximation errors in policy and value function approximations.
method State-aggregated representations and policy gradient methods.
result Policy gradient methods can achieve a per-period regret bounded by ε, while approximate policy iteration and value iteration have a higher regret.
Entropy regularization is commonly used to improve policy optimization in reinforcement learning. It is believed to help with \emph{exploration} by encouraging the selection of more stochastic policies. In this work, we analyze this claim using new visualizations of the optimization landscape based on randomly perturbi…
Recently, a novel class of Approximate Policy Iteration (API) algorithms have demonstrated impressive practical performance (e.g., ExIt from [2], AlphaGo-Zero from [27]). This new family of algorithms maintains, and alternately optimizes, two policies: a fast, reactive policy (e.g., a deep neural network) deployed at t…
We develop a normative framework for hierarchical model-based policy optimization based on applying second-order methods in the space of all possible state-action paths. The resulting natural path gradient performs policy updates in a manner which is sensitive to the long-range correlational structure of the induced st…
Methods for learning to search for structured prediction typically imitate a reference policy, with existing theoretical guarantees demonstrating low regret compared to that reference. This is unsatisfactory in many applications where the reference policy is suboptimal and the goal of learning is to improve upon it. Ca…
Swarm systems constitute a challenging problem for reinforcement learning (RL) as the algorithm needs to learn decentralized control policies that can cope with limited local sensing and communication abilities of the agents. While it is often difficult to directly define the behavior of the agents, simple communicatio…