You are provided with the abstract of a scientific paper and the abstracts of the papers it references. Your task is to write a Related Work section for the main paper. This section should concisely summarize and integrate the key points from the cited abstracts, reflecting how they relate to the main paper's contributions and context. In your summary, use numerical citation markers like [1], [2], etc., to refer to the corresponding papers.

Main Abstract:
Gradient-based optimization is the foundation of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Even when the mechanism being optimized is unknown or not differentiable, optimization using high-variance or biased gradient estimates is still often the best strategy. We introduce a general framework for learning low-variance, unbiased gradient estimators for black-box functions of random variables. Our method uses gradients of a neural network trained jointly with model parameters or policies, and is applicable in both discrete and continuous settings. We demonstrate this framework for training discrete latent-variable models. We also give an unbiased, action-conditional extension of the advantage actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm.

Cited Abstract(s):
[1]: Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample efficiency during training. In this work, we propose a control variate method to effectively reduce variance for policy gradient methods. Motivated by the Stein's identity, our method extends the previous control variate methods used in REINFORCE and advantage actor-critic by introducing more general action-dependent baseline functions. Empirical studies show that our method significantly improves the sample efficiency of the state-of-the-art policy gradient approaches.
In parallel to our work, there has been a string of recent developments on action-dependent baselines for policy-gradient methods in reinforcement learning. Such works include and which train an action-dependent baseline which incorporates off-policy data. [1] independently develop a method similar to LAX applied to continuous control. exploit per-dimension independence of the action distribution in continuous control tasks to produce an action-dependent unbiased baseline.