A Family of Robust Stochastic Operators for Reinforcement Learning

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (NeurIPS 2019)

Authors

Yingdong Lu, Mark Squillante, Chai Wah Wu

Abstract

We consider a new family of stochastic operators for reinforcement learning with the goal of alleviating negative effects and becoming more robust to approximation or estimation errors. Various theoretical results are established, which include showing that our family of operators preserve optimality and increase the action gap in a stochastic sense. Our empirical results illustrate the strong benefits of our robust stochastic operators, significantly outperforming the classical Bellman operator and recently proposed operators.