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Fitted Q-iteration by Advantage Weighted Regression
Gerhard Neumann · Jan Peters

Tue Dec 09 11:53 AM -- 11:54 AM (PST) @
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Recently, fitted Q-iteration (FQI) based methods have become more popular due to their increased sample efficiency, a more stable learning process and the higher quality of the resulting policy. However, these methods remain hard to use for continuous action spaces which frequently occur in real-world tasks, e.g., in robotics and other technical applications. The greedy action selection commonly used for the policy improvement step is particularly problematic as it is expensive for continuous actions, can cause an unstable learning process, introduces an optimization bias and results in highly non-smooth policies unsuitable for real-world systems. In this paper, we show that by using a soft-greedy action selection the policy improvement step used in FQI can be simplified to an inexpensive advantage-weighted regression. With this result, we are able to derive a new, computationally efficient FQI algorithm which can even deal with high dimensional action spaces.

Author Information

Gerhard Neumann (Graz University of Technology)
Jan Peters (TU Darmstadt & DFKI)

Jan Peters is a full professor (W3) for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and at the same time a senior research scientist and group leader at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he heads the interdepartmental Robot Learning Group. Jan Peters has received the Dick Volz Best 2007 US PhD Thesis Runner-Up Award, the Robotics: Science & Systems - Early Career Spotlight, the INNS Young Investigator Award, and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society‘s Early Career Award as well as numerous best paper awards. In 2015, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant. Jan Peters has studied Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical and Control Engineering at TU Munich and FernUni Hagen in Germany, at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Southern California (USC). He has received four Master‘s degrees in these disciplines as well as a Computer Science PhD from USC.

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