Q-PrOP: Sample-efficient policy gradient with an off-policy critic

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been successful in a wide variety of simulated domains. However, a major obstacle facing deep RL in the real world is their high sample complexity. Batch policy gradient methods offer stable learning, but at the cost of high variance, which often requires large batches. TD-style methods, such as off-policy actor-critic and Q-learning, are more sample-efficient but biased, and often require costly hyperparameter sweeps to stabilize. In this work, we aim to develop methods that combine the stability of policy gradients with the efficiency of off-policy RL. We present Q-Prop, a policy gradient method that uses a Taylor expansion of the off-policy critic as a control variate. Q-Prop is both sample efficient and stable, and effectively combines the benefits of on-policy and off-policy methods. We analyze the connection between Q-Prop and existing model-free algorithms, and use control variate theory to derive two variants of Q-Prop with conservative and aggressive adaptation. We show that conservative Q-Prop provides substantial gains in sample efficiency over trust region policy optimization (TRPO) with generalized advantage estimation (GAE), and improves stability over deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), the state-of-the-art on-policy and off-policy methods, on OpenAI Gym's MuJoCo continuous control environments

Differential Dynamic Programming for time-delayed systems

Trajectory optimization considers the problem of deciding how to control a dynamical system to move along a trajectory which minimizes some cost function. Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an optimal control method which utilizes a second-order approximation of the problem to find the control. It is fast enough to allow real-time control and has been shown to work well for trajectory optimization in robotic systems. Here we extend classic DDP to systems with multiple time-delays in the state. Being able to find optimal trajectories for time-delayed systems with DDP opens up the possibility to use richer models for system identification and control, including recurrent neural networks with multiple timesteps in the state. We demonstrate the algorithm on a two-tank continuous stirred tank reactor. We also demonstrate the algorithm on a recurrent neural network trained to model an inverted pendulum with position information only.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, conference, Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE 55th Conference o

Average energy efficiency contours with multiple decoding policies

This letter addresses energy-efficient design in multi-user, single-carrier uplink channels by employing multiple decoding policies. The comparison metric used in this study is based on average energy efficiency contours, where an optimal rate vector is obtained based on four system targets: Maximum energy efficiency, a trade-off between maximum energy efficiency and rate fairness, achieving energy efficiency target with maximum sum-rate and achieving energy efficiency target with fairness. The transmit power function is approximated using Taylor series expansion, with simulation results demonstrating the achievability of the optimal rate vector, and negligible performance difference in employing this approximation