{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"The Successful Ingredients of Policy Gradient Algorithms","authors":[{"name":"Sven Gronauer","slug":"sven-gronauer","given":"Sven","family":"Gronauer","affiliation":""},{"name":"Martin Gottwald","slug":"martin-gottwald","given":"Martin","family":"Gottwald","affiliation":""},{"name":"Klaus Diepold","slug":"klaus-diepold","given":"Klaus","family":"Diepold","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Despite the sublime success in recent years, the underlying mechanisms powering the advances of reinforcement learning are yet poorly understood. In this paper, we identify these mechanisms - which we call ingredients - in on-policy policy gradient methods and empirically determine their impact on the learning. To allow an equitable assessment, we conduct our experiments based on a unified and modular implementation. Our results underline the significance of recent algorithmic advances and demonstrate that reaching state-of-the-art performance may not need sophisticated algorithms but can also be accomplished by the combination of a few simple ingredients.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2021/338","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/338","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0338.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/338.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/bibtex/338","volume":{"slug":"2021","title":"Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2021","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/","year":2021,"location":"Montreal","dates":"19-27 August 2021","editors":"Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou","isbn":"978-0-9992411-9-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2021"},"section":"Machine Learning","track":"Main Track","number":338,"pages":{"first":2455,"last":2461},"keywords":["Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Validation and Verification","Machine Learning: Deep Reinforcement Learning","AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: Reproducibility"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}