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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Policy Gradient Methods: Analysis, Misconceptions, And Improvements, Christopher P. Nota
Policy Gradient Methods: Analysis, Misconceptions, And Improvements, Christopher P. Nota
Doctoral Dissertations
Policy gradient methods are a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that optimize a parametric policy by maximizing an objective function that directly measures the performance of the policy. Despite being used in many high-profile applications of reinforcement learning, the conventional use of policy gradient methods in practice deviates from existing theory. This thesis presents a comprehensive mathematical analysis of policy gradient methods, uncovering misconceptions and suggesting novel solutions to improve their performance. We first demonstrate that the update rule used by most policy gradient methods does not correspond to the gradient of any objective function due to the way the …
Multi-Slam Systems For Fault-Tolerant Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, Samer Nashed
Multi-Slam Systems For Fault-Tolerant Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, Samer Nashed
Doctoral Dissertations
Mobile robots need accurate, high fidelity models of their operating environments in order to complete their tasks safely and efficiently. Generating these models is most often done via Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), a paradigm where the robot alternatively estimates the most up-to-date model of the environment and its position relative to this model as it acquires new information from its sensors over time. Because robots operate in many different environments with different compute, memory, sensing, and form constraints, the nature and quality of information available to individual instances of different SLAM systems varies substantially. `One-size-fits-all' solutions are thus exceedingly …