Machine learningReinforcement learning
Policy Gradient Methods
Policy gradient methods are reinforcement-learning algorithms that optimize a parameterized policy directly by gradient ascent on the expected return, rather than learning action-values and acting greedily. Founded on Ronald Williams' 1992 REINFORCE algorithm and the policy gradient theorem of Sutton and colleagues (2000), they naturally handle stochastic and continuous action spaces and underpin modern actor-critic and deep-RL algorithms.
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Sources
- Williams, R. J. (1992). Simple statistical gradient-following algorithms for connectionist reinforcement learning. Machine Learning, 8(3–4), 229–256. DOI: 10.1007/BF00992696 ↗
- Sutton, R. S., McAllester, D., Singh, S., & Mansour, Y. (2000). Policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning with function approximation. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 12, 1057–1063. link ↗