THE CONFERENCE
FOR AUTHORS
FOR PARTICIPANTS

Timezone: »

 
Talk
Reinforcement Learning with Deep Energy-Based Policies
Tuomas Haarnoja · Haoran Tang · Pieter Abbeel · Sergey Levine

Sun Aug 06 08:48 PM -- 09:06 PM (PDT) @ C4.5
in Reinforcement learning 2 »

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new algorithm, called soft Q-learning, that expresses the optimal policy via a Boltzmann distribution. We use the recently proposed amortized Stein variational gradient descent to learn a stochastic sampling network that approximates samples from this distribution. The benefits of the proposed algorithm include improved exploration and compositionality that allows transferring skills between tasks, which we confirm in simulated experiments with swimming and walking robots. We also draw a connection to actor-critic methods, which can be viewed performing approximate inference on the corresponding energy-based model.

[ PDF]  [ ss Summary/Notes]  [ Video] 

Author Information

Tuomas Haarnoja (UC Berkeley)
Haoran Tang (UC Berkeley)
Pieter Abbeel (OpenAI / UC Berkeley)
Sergey Levine (Berkeley)
Sergey Levine

Sergey Levine received a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2009, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in fall 2016. His work focuses on machine learning for decision making and control, with an emphasis on deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms. Applications of his work include autonomous robots and vehicles, as well as computer vision and graphics. His research includes developing algorithms for end-to-end training of deep neural network policies that combine perception and control, scalable algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning algorithms, and more.

Related Events (a corresponding poster, oral, or spotlight)

More from the Same Authors