Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot scale to tasks with very high state and action dimensionality such as 3D humanoid l…
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48 results for “soft policy gradient”
Short note on soft-max and policy gradients in bandit problems using Lyapunov functions.
problem Analyzing soft-max and policy gradient methods in bandit problems.
method Lyapunov function argument for soft-max and differential equations for policy gradient algorithms.
result Regret bounds for soft-max and a different policy gradient algorithm in bandit problems.
New reinforcement learning algorithms improve policy optimization with entropy regularization.
problem Improving policy optimization in reinforcement learning.
method Soft policy gradient theorem (SPGT) and new policy optimization algorithms.
result New algorithms outperform prior works on various benchmark tasks.
Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly conservative. Our soft-robust framework is an attempt to overcome this issue. In this pa…
Paper introduces RCaI, a risk-sensitive control method using Rényi divergence.
problem Risk-sensitive control in reinforcement learning.
method RCaI extends CaI using Rényi divergence variational inference.
result Risk-sensitive optimal policy can be obtained by solving a soft Bellman equation.
New method combines value function decomposition and policy gradients for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning.
problem Challenges in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, especially credit assignment and large action spaces.
method Decomposed Soft Actor-Critic (mSAC) method with Q network architecture, discrete probabilistic policy, and counterfactual advantage function.
result Significantly outperforms policy-based approach COMA and achieves competitive results with SOTA value-based approach Qmix.
Soft modularization improves sample efficiency and performance in reinforcement learning.
problem Challenges in training multiple tasks jointly in reinforcement learning.
method Explicit modularization technique on policy representation, soft modularization method.
result Improves sample efficiency and performance over strong baselines in robotics manipulation tasks.
Pretraining reinforcement learning methods with demonstrations has been an important concept in the study of reinforcement learning since a large amount of computing power is spent on online simulations with existing reinforcement learning algorithms. Pretraining reinforcement learning remains a significant challenge i…
Simple model-based reinforcement learning outperforms model-free methods in complex tasks.
problem Lagging performance of model-based reinforcement learning agents in non-trivial environments.
method Combining soft value estimates with stochastic value gradients.
result Simple model-based agents achieve state-of-the-art results in a high-dimensional humanoid control task.
New method improves stability of soft FQI for offline RL.
problem Stability issues in soft FQI under function approximation.
method Stationary reweighting to align operator norms.
result Local linear convergence proved under certain conditions.
Enhances RL performance with a population-guided parallel learning scheme.
problem Improving off-policy reinforcement learning performance.
method Population-guided parallel learning scheme with shared experience replay buffer and soft policy update.
result Monotone improvement of the expected cumulative return proved theoretically and demonstrated in practice.
Paper proposes risk-averse reinforcement learning algorithms.
problem Managing model uncertainty in reinforcement learning.
method Entropic risk constrained policy gradient and actor-critic algorithms.
result Demonstrates usefulness of risk-averse algorithms on various domains.
Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the action-values, with the addition of entropy regularization for soft variants. In th…
Entropy-regularized NPG methods converge linearly in discounted MDPs.
problem Theoretical limitations of NPG methods in reinforcement learning.
method Entropy regularization in conjunction with NPG methods for discounted MDPs.
result Entropy-regularized NPG methods converge linearly in discounted MDPs.
AES improves policy gradient performance by adaptively selecting experience.
problem High variance in gradient estimators from past trajectories.
method AES learns an adaptive sampling distribution to minimise gradient variance.
result AES leads to significantly improved performance in continuous control tasks.
Model-free deep reinforcement learning has been shown to exhibit good performance in domains ranging from video games to simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion. However, model-free methods are known to perform poorly when the interaction time with the environment is limited, as is the case for most real-world ro…
Paper uses SAC and DDPG to optimize cryptocurrency portfolios.
problem Adapting to volatile and nonlinear cryptocurrency markets.
method Reinforcement learning with SAC and DDPG algorithms.
result SAC and DDPG outperform traditional strategies in cryptocurrency markets.
New algorithms optimize a soft-robust criterion in reinforcement learning, reducing conservatism.
problem Computing robust policies for high-stakes decisions with limited data.
method Soft-robust criterion using risk measures, two algorithms for optimization.
result Our algorithms produce less conservative solutions than existing methods.
We present Multitask Soft Option Learning(MSOL), a hierarchical multitask framework based on Planning as Inference. MSOL extends the concept of options, using separate variational posteriors for each task, regularized by a shared prior. This ''soft'' version of options avoids several instabilities during training in a …
NM-PPG optimizes adaptive feature acquisition in POMDPs for better predictions.
problem Optimizing adaptive feature acquisition in prediction problems with costly features.
method Non-myopic pathwise policy gradients (NM-PPG) with continuous relaxation and straight-through rollout.
result NM-PPG outperforms state-of-the-art AFA methods on synthetic and real-world datasets.
LC-SAC tackles non-stationary dynamics in reinforcement learning.
problem Degradation of deep RL methods in non-stationary environments.
method LC-SAC uses latent context encoders and contrastive loss for dynamic information capture.
result LC-SAC outperforms SAC on environments with drastic dynamics changes.
TOPPO improves PPO for MTRL by balancing critic gradients, outperforming SAC.
problem Critic-side gradient ill-conditioning in PPO for MTRL.
method Critic Balancing modules to improve gradient conditioning and balance task updates.
result TOPPO achieves stronger mean and tail-task performance than SAC-family and ARS-family baselines.
New algorithms estimate Q-functions under partial coverage and realizability, improving offline RL guarantees.
problem Offline RL with limited exploration and assumptions about data coverage and Q-function realizability.
method Proposes minimax learning algorithms to estimate soft or vanilla Q-functions with -convergence guarantees.
result PAC guarantees for offline RL under partial coverage and realizability conditions.
This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to preserve optimality of stochastic policies, and demonstrate that the ability of an a…
Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate policy evaluation followed by a softened policy improvement step. As so, they are…
We study the sparse entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (ERL) problem in which the entropy term is a special form of the Tsallis entropy. The optimal policy of this formulation is sparse, i.e.,~at each state, it has non-zero probability for only a small number of actions. This addresses the main drawback of the …
Paper tackles DOCTR-L with SciPhy RL, solving neural PDEs from data.
problem High-dimensional optimal control with stochastic policies.
method Soft HJB equation, Neural PDEs, Physics-Informed Neural Networks.
result Reduces DOCTR-L to solving neural PDEs from data.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm within the maximum entropy RL framework which offers greater stability and empiric…
Improving Generalization of Reinforcement Learning with Minimax Distributional Soft Actor-Criticcs.LG
Improves RL generalization by minimizing adversarial risk.
problem Overfitting to training environments and poor generalization to unseen scenarios.
method Introduces minimax formulation and distributional framework to RL.
result Trained policy shows improved generalization to different environments.
Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to nonconvexity and even divergence in optimization. As a result, the global convergence …
Enhances PMD with lookahead to improve RL performance.
problem Improving RL performance with greedy policies over 1-step.
method Integrates multi-step greedy policies into PMD with lookahead.
result Shows faster convergence rate for -PMD.
AOPU stabilizes NN training by approximating natural gradient, improving stability and convergence.
problem Stability and interpretability in online NN training for industrial soft sensors.
method AOPU truncates gradient backpropagation, optimizing trackable parameters, and approximating natural gradient.
result AOPU achieves stable convergence and superior performance on chemical process datasets.
CSAC enables cooperative reinforcement learning for multi-stage tasks.
problem Coordinating consecutive reinforcement learning agents for long-term multi-stage tasks.
method CSAC modifies each agent's policy to maximize both current and next agent's critic.
result CSAC outperforms uncooperative policies and single-agent training in multi-room maze domain.
This work connects IRL methods from ML and economics.
problem Solving the inverse reinforcement learning problem.
method Shows connections and differences between various IRL methods.
result Identifies key computational and algorithmic differences.
New framework optimizes decisions under uncertainty considering causal and continuous data.
problem Optimizing decisions under uncertain distributions with causal and continuous data structures.
method Developed a framework using Causal Sinkhorn DRO with Soft Regression Forest decision rules.
result Framework provides interpretable and tractable decision rules for optimizing under uncertainty.
Improved SAC with AWMP for better control tasks.
problem Discontinuous and non-smooth optimal policies in reinforcement learning.
method Advantage Weighted Mixture Policy (AWMP) for SAC, learning state-specific weights.
result SAC with AWMP outperforms SAC in four control tasks.
A new method removes policy optimization in adversarial imitation learning.
problem Adversarial imitation learning's delicate alternated optimization.
method Explicitly condition discriminator on two policies, solving generator's optimization problem directly.
result Simpler approach competitive to prevalent methods.
Proposes a new sampling policy for ranking and selection problems.
problem Improving ranking and selection in adaptive sampling policies.
method Annealed entropic allocation, using soft-min weights and saddlepoint corrections.
result Consistently competitive performance in various settings.
Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL objective and thus generally converges to a policy different from the optimal gree…
On Generalization and Distributional Update for Mimicking Observations with Adequate Explorationstat.ML
MODULE solves LfO problem with high sample efficiency and stability.
problem Sample inefficiency and instability in LfO.
method Modified DSAC with MODULE algorithm.
result Superior performance in MuJoCo environments.
We comment on the fact that gradient ascent for logistic regression has a connection with the perceptron learning algorithm. Logistic learning is the "soft" variant of perceptron learning.
Gradient descent finds halfspaces with low error for agnostic learning.
problem Agnostic learning of linear halfspaces with convex surrogates.
method Gradient descent on convex surrogates for zero-one loss.
result Gradient descent finds halfspaces with error in poly time and sample complexity.
Paper improves AIRL by enhancing policy imitation and addressing reward recovery issues.
problem Inadequate policy imitation and limited transferable reward recovery in AIRL.
method Substituted built-in algorithm with SAC for policy updating and proposed PPO-AIRL + SAC hybrid framework.
result SAC improves policy imitation but hinders reward recovery; PPO-AIRL + SAC achieves satisfactory transfer effect.
GSI improves efficiency of large language model inference.
problem Efficiently guiding test-time alignment in large language models.
method Combines soft best-of- scaling with a reward model and speculative samples.
result Achieves higher accuracy and reduced latency compared to standard methods.
MSLG generates soft labels to improve DNN performance on noisy datasets.
problem Significant performance degradation of DNNs due to noisy labels.
method Meta-learning techniques to estimate optimal label distribution and iteratively update soft labels.
result MSLG outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on various datasets.
Paper proposes a RL approach for ALM with superior performance.
problem Dynamic asset-liability management in financial markets.
method Continuous-time RL with LQ formulation, policy gradient, adaptive and scheduled exploration.
result Method outperforms traditional and state-of-the-art RL algorithms in ALM.
Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actorcs.LG
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and brittle convergence properties, which necessitate meticulous hyperparameter tuning…
Meta-gradient D4PG optimizes performance and constraint adherence in RL.
problem Balancing performance and adherence to complex constraints in RL.
method Uses meta-gradients to find a balance between expected return and minimizing constraint violations.
result Meta-gradient D4PG consistently outperforms baselines across MuJoCo domains.