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Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Jonathan Lebensold , William Hamilton , Borja Balle , Doina Precup

Modelling and exploiting teammates' policies in cooperative multi-agent systems have long been an interest and also a big challenge for the reinforcement learning (RL) community. The interest lies in the fact that if the agent knows the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Hangyu Mao , Zhengchao Zhang , Zhen Xiao , Zhibo Gong

In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm - the Skill-Driven Skill Recombination Algorithm (SDSRA) - an innovative framework that significantly enhances the efficiency of achieving maximum entropy in reinforcement learning tasks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Eric H. Jiang , Andrew Lizarraga

Differential evolution is one of the most prestigious population-based stochastic optimization algorithm for black-box problems. The performance of a differential evolution algorithm depends highly on its mutation and crossover strategy and…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Jianyong Sun , Xin Liu , Thomas Bäck , Zongben Xu

Learning agents can make use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to decide their actions by using a reward function. However, the learning process is greatly influenced by the elect of values of the hyperparameters used in the learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Adarsh Sehgal , Nicholas Ward , Hung La , Sushil Louis

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

Deterministic-policy actor-critic algorithms for continuous control improve the actor by plugging its actions into the critic and ascending the action-value gradient, which is obtained by chaining the actor's Jacobian matrix with the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Pierluca D'Oro , Wojciech Jaśkowski

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

Human-computer interactive systems that rely on machine learning are becoming paramount to the lives of millions of people who use digital assistants on a daily basis. Yet, further advances are limited by the availability of data and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Katya Kudashkina , Valliappa Chockalingam , Graham W. Taylor , Michael Bowling

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

A widely-used actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous control, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG), suffers from the overestimation problem, which can negatively affect the performance. Although the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

In reinforcement learning, off-policy actor-critic methods like DDPG and TD3 use deterministic policy gradients: the Q-function is learned from environment data, while the actor maximizes it via gradient ascent. We observe that in complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Ayush Jain , Norio Kosaka , Xinhu Li , Kyung-Min Kim , Erdem Bıyık , Joseph J. Lim

Active policy search combines the trial-and-error methodology from policy search with Bayesian optimization to actively find the optimal policy. First, policy search is a type of reinforcement learning which has become very popular for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Ruben Martinez-Cantin

Over the past decades, more and more methods gain a giant development due to the development of technology. Evolutionary Algorithms are widely used as a heuristic method. However, the budget of computation increases exponentially when the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Yangjie Mei , Hao Wang

Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Kaiqing Zhang , Xiangyuan Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

In this paper, a new offline actor-critic learning algorithm is introduced: Sampled Policy Gradient (SPG). SPG samples in the action space to calculate an approximated policy gradient by using the critic to evaluate the samples. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Anton Orell Wiehe , Nil Stolt Ansó , Madalina M. Drugan , Marco A. Wiering

We propose expected policy gradients (EPG), which unify stochastic policy gradients (SPG) and deterministic policy gradients (DPG) for reinforcement learning. Inspired by expected sarsa, EPG integrates (or sums) across actions when…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-05 Kamil Ciosek , Shimon Whiteson

In modern robotics, effectively computing optimal control policies under dynamically varying environments poses substantial challenges to the off-the-shelf parametric policy gradient methods, such as the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Apan Dastider , Mingjie Lin

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for addressing complex control problems, particularly those involving underactuated robotic systems. However, in some cases, policies may require refinement to achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Marco Calì , Alberto Sinigaglia , Niccolò Turcato , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

Efficient utilization of the replay buffer plays a significant role in the off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms used for model-free control policy synthesis for complex dynamical systems. We propose a method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Nikhil Kumar Singh , Indranil Saha