2020

Zeroth-Order Supervised Policy Improvement

Sun, Hao, Xu, Ziping, Song, Yuhang et al.

Understand

Policy gradient (PG) algorithms have been widely used in reinforcement learning (RL).

  • However, PG algorithms rely on exploiting the value function being learned with the first-order update locally, which results in limited sample efficiency.
  • In this work, we propose an alternative method called Zeroth-Order Supervised Policy Improvement (ZOSPI).
  • ZOSPI exploits the estimated value function $Q$ globally while preserving the local exploitation of the PG methods based on zeroth-order policy optimization.

Reading the bibliography…