Header logo is

Reinforcement Learning by Relative Entropy Policy Search

2010

Poster

ei


Policy search is a successful approach to reinforcement learning. However, policy improvements often result in the loss of information. Hence, it has been marred by premature convergence and implausible solutions. As first suggested in the context of covariant policy gradients, many of these problems may be addressed by constraining the information loss. In this book chapter, we continue this path of reasoning and suggest the Relative Entropy Policy Search (REPS) method. The resulting method differs significantly from previous policy gradient approaches and yields an exact update step. It works well on typical reinforcement learning benchmark problems. We will also present a real-world applications where a robot employs REPS to learn how to return balls in a game of table tennis.

Author(s): Peters, J. and Mülling, K. and Altun, Y.
Journal: 30th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering (MaxEnt 2010)
Volume: 30
Pages: 69
Year: 2010
Month: July
Day: 0

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Poster (poster)

Digital: 0
Language: en
Organization: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
School: Biologische Kybernetik

Links: PDF

BibTex

@poster{6746,
  title = {Reinforcement Learning by Relative Entropy Policy Search},
  author = {Peters, J. and M{\"u}lling, K. and Altun, Y.},
  journal = {30th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering (MaxEnt 2010)},
  volume = {30},
  pages = {69},
  organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
  school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
  month = jul,
  year = {2010},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {7}
}