Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper unifies the optimistic policy Iteration and
the natural actor critic (NAC) approach for Gibbs policies. It presents a
slight modification of the NAC algorithm, where the original algorithm is
a special case which is called forgetful NAC. The authors show that forget
full Nac and optimistic policy iteration are equivalent. The authors also
present a non-optimality result for soft-greedy Gibbs distribution, I.e.,
the optimal solution is not a fixed point of the policy iteration
algorithm.
I liked the unified view on both type of algorithms.
While the new presented algorithm is equivalent to the existing optimistic
policy iteration, the relationship between the natural actor critic and
the value-based optimistic policy iteration algorithm where very
interesting to me. I think the paper might be an important step to get a
better understanding of both methods. The main weakness of the paper are
the experiments where I think it would be good to show the effect of
surpressing oscillations also for more complex tasks.
Clarity: The
paper is well written. Some parts should be clarified. for example the
definition of the action value function in line 100 (where one function is
actually an advantage function). The intuition of optimistic policy
iteration (line 122) could also be better explained.
Relevance:
the paper is relevant for the RL community to get a better understanding
of the NAC methods.
Significance: the paper presents an important
step to get a better understanding of the NAC methods.
Minor
issues: - what do you mean with w.p.l. ? I could not even find this
abbreviation in Google... - line 99: the parameter vectors w_k are not
properly introduced
Q2: Please summarize your review
in 1-2 sentences
The paper presents a nice unified view on natural
actor critic and optimistic policy iteration algorithms. The weakness of
the paper are the experiments, which only cover a toy
task. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper is interesting. The author has developed
some new ways of thinking about existing reinforcement-learning algorithms
and the relationships between them. A new "forgetful" actor-critic
algorithm is proposed which brings policy-gradient and action-value
methods into closer alignment; it can be proved to be equivalent to a
softmax action-value method in a certain sense. It is hoped that these
understandings might enable better convergence results or new algorithms
with better convergence properties. However, it seems fair to me to say
that not much has come out of this yet; it is mostly potential. And the
work is very technical and detailed. We might ask the authors to keep
going, and wish them luck, but not want to see the details of their
special ways of viewing these algorithms until after they have borne
fruit. I guess this is my recommendation. Right now these inconclusive
improvements in understanding will likely be interesting to very few NIPS
readers. The paper might be a good one for a more specialized meeting.
--- After feedback and seeing the other reviews:
I
am glad to see that other reviewers also say the interesting points of
this paper. Maybe it is not such a specialized topic after all. I will
raise my assessment a notch.
Q2: Please
summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
Some deep thinking about the detailed relationships
between major classes of reinforcement learning algorithms, but which has
not yet reached a conclusion that is meaningful to anyone outside a tiny
sliver of the reinforcement-learning research community. Might be suitable
for a more specialized meeting than NIPS.
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper "Optimistic policy iteration and natural
actor-critic: A unifying view and a non-optimality result" investigates
policy iteration and natural actor critic (NAC) methods for approximate
solutions of Markov decision processes. The setting considers Boltzmann
policies, compatible function approximation, and unbiased estimators. The
authors introduce a forgetting factor in the NAC update (parameterized by
a weight kappa), and show that this version is identical to an incremental
("optimistic") policy iteration (OPI) with learning rate kappa. By making
the weight kappa go to zero and decreasing at the same time the policy
temperature, the two algorithms tend towards a common limit corresponding
to the original NAC (with policies that tend to fully greedy ones). This
is exploited to derive insight on the two algorithms and how the
convergence of OPI might be established using NAC; as well as to interpret
the policy oscillation phenomenon in policy iteration. Then, the authors
show that when the temperature is not allowed to decrease to 0, the
unified algorithm cannot converge to any nontrivial optimal solution, for
any learning rate. Together, the results suggest a good OPI algorithm
might be obtained by allowing the parameters to tend to the limits
discussed above (both weight kappa and the temperature going to zero, with
the overall algorithm thus tending towards NAC). This is illustrated with
simulations in a toy problem.
I think this is an insightful paper
and has the potential to make a significant impact in the field of
approximate reinforcement learning and dynamic programming. The way the
authors look at the problem is original. The survey of existing
convergence results is very nice.
While the paper is well-written
in general, the detailed technical discussions are often rather dense and
not easy to read; therefore, some work to alleviate this would be well
spent. In particular, getting the intuition behind the discussion on the
relation between standard NAC and the OPI limiting case (e.g. the
next-to-last paragraph of Section 3) took a bit of rereading in my case.
I also have some non-major comments on the formalism. - The
authors should be careful to introduce all notations properly. E.g. J may
not be explained in the first paragraph of Section 2; the Qbar notation is
not explained there either, and also not needed (it can be introduced
later on near the equation where it is defined). Similarly, the natural
gradient formula in (6) is left unexplained. - Instead of saying "some
norm", it could be called as usual a p-norm and denoted ||..||_p. -
The readability is decreased by the use at some places of negative
notations rather than positives that are easier to follow, and sometimes
even easier to write. Example: tau does not tend to 0, instead of tau_k
> 0 \forall k; or r(s, a) does not tend to +-\infty, instead of |r(s,
a)| <= R_max which is easier to write. The statement "x < eps for
all eps > 0" actually defines x = 0. - I suggest introducing some
different notation for the rescaled versions of the parameters w, such as
w' or v, since this would make the change to the algorithm easier to
follow.
Some other presentation comments: - Perhaps the
abstract might make explicit the fact that NAC must be modified to make it
equivalent to OPI - The keyword "reinforcement learning" could be
added somewhere early in the introduction - "In addition to that the
class" doesn't seem to be a well-formed sentence - Regarding
terminology: in "non-optimistic" policy iteration, it may also be
necessary to have w^_k be "complete" in the sense explained one para
below, in addition to kappa = 1. - "no modifications to the existing
algorithms are needed" -- with the exception of the forgetting factor in
NAC(kapppa), this should be pointed out - The difference between the
first and second part of Theorem 3 could be pointed out better/in advance,
I had to reread the passage a couple of times to understand. Also, the
progression from Theorem 2 to Theorem 3 might be explained in advance to
prepare the reader.
AFTER AUTHOR FEEDBACK: I am grateful to
the authors for responding to my comments. My point about "no
modifications" was not to say that we have new algorithms in the paper,
but rather suggesting to admit that NAC and OPI are not immediately
equivalent; before that some changes to NAC to make it more general must
be made. I still think that saying "x < eps for all eps > 0" is
mathematically equivalent to saying x=0 (in the context of positive x) so
as the authors say, it would be good to revise the statement.
I
keep my overall (positive) opinion about the paper.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
An insightful paper about the convergence of
optimistic policy iteration and its relationship to natural actor critic
algorithms. It can make an impact in the approximate RL field, by pointing
out a quite general approach that does not work, which suggests a possible
way forward to something that does work. Some formalism can be introduced
better, and making the dense discussions easier to read would also
help.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank the reviewers for their accurate and detailed
reviews, and for updating their reviews after the rebuttal phase. We agree
with many of the improvement possibilities noted by the reviewers and will
incorporate them into the final version. The reviewers also asked some
minor questions, to which we provide answers in the following.
w.p.1: with probability one (we will open up this in the paper)
'"no modifications to the existing algorithms are needed" -- well,
with the exception of the forgetting factor in NAC(kappa)?': NAC(kappa) is
equivalent to the unmodified form of optimistic policy iteration (OPI), so
adding the forgetting factor does not lead to a new algorithm but merely
redefines OPI using the NAC notation. An answer to further comments:
Interpolation between the algorithms (with NAC being approached in the
limit) can be performed also with unmodified OPI using its original
(traditional) definition, with the implication that the unmodified,
un-redefined NAC is directly a limiting special case of OPI. We do not
claim that unmodified NAC and OPI would be /equivalent/, but that the
former is a /limiting special case/ of the latter.
Non-optimistic
policy iteration: yes, w_k indeed needs to be "complete" (will be
corrected).
x < epsilon, for all epsilon > 0: The expression
is analogous to the statement 'x \to 0' in a limit expression (cf. the
epsilon-delta definition of limit), except for being applicable also
outside a limit statement (i.e., without the presence of another variable
that would go toward something while x goes toward zero). We have replaced
it with a clearer alternative.
We decided to keep the "negative
notations" in the paper, as replacing them with "positive" ones would
either lose preciseness or add clutter.
An advance explanation of
Theorem 3 was added to the extended version (there was no space for it in
the length-limited version).
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