{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/policy-optimization-with-second-order","title":"Policy Optimization with Second-Order Advantage Information","arxiv_id":"1805.03586","date":"2018-05-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiajin Li","Baoxiang Wang"],"abstract":"Policy optimization on high-dimensional continuous control tasks exhibits its difficulty caused by the large variance of the policy gradient estimators. We present the action subspace dependent gradient (ASDG) estimator which incorporates the Rao-Blackwell theorem (RB) and Control Variates (CV) into a unified framework to reduce the variance. To invoke RB, our proposed algorithm (POSA) learns the underlying factorization structure among the action space based on the second-order advantage information. POSA captures the quadratic information explicitly and efficiently by utilizing the wide & deep architecture. Empirical studies show that our proposed approach demonstrates the performance improvements on high-dimensional synthetic settings and OpenAI Gym's MuJoCo continuous control tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.03586v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.03586v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"policy-optimization-with-second-order","repo_url":"https://github.com/wangbx66/Action-Subspace-Dependent","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"mujoco","task_name":"MuJoCo"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}