Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 (NIPS 2006)
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Yaakov Engel
Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a param- eterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional pol- icy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate this gradient. Since Monte Carlo methods tend to have high variance, a large number of samples is required, resulting in slow convergence. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian framework that models the policy gradient as a Gaussian process. This reduces the number of samples needed to obtain accurate gradient estimates. Moreover, estimates of the natural gradient as well as a measure of the uncertainty in the gradient estimates are provided at little extra cost.