2016

Combining policy gradient and Q-learning

O'Donoghue, Brendan, Munos, Remi, Kavukcuoglu, Koray et al.

Understand

Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting.

  • However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data.
  • In this paper we describe a new technique that combines policy gradient with off-policy Q-learning, drawing experience from a replay buffer.
  • This is motivated by making a connection between the fixed points of the regularized policy gradient algorithm and the Q-values.

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