English
Related papers

Related papers: Combining policy gradient and Q-learning

200 papers

Q-Learning is a fundamental off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has the objective of approximating action-value functions in order to learn optimal policies. Nonetheless, it has difficulties in reconciling bias with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Mahammad Humayoo

Policy gradient methods have become one of the most popular classes of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. A key challenge, however, that is not addressed by many of these methods is multi-agent credit assignment: assessing…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Jacopo Castellini , Sam Devlin , Frans A. Oliehoek , Rahul Savani

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on learning policies solely from a batch of previously collected data. offering the potential to leverage such datasets effectively without the need for costly or risky active exploration. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Riccardo Zamboni , Enrico Brunetti , Marcello Restelli

We propose Q-learning with Adjoint Matching (QAM), a novel TD-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that tackles a long-standing challenge in continuous-action RL: efficient optimization of an expressive diffusion or flow-matching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

Off-policy reinforcement learning suffers from extrapolation errors when a learned policy selects actions that are weakly supported in the replay buffer. In this study, we address this issue by drawing an analogy to static friction. From…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hyunwoo Kim , Hyo Kyung Lee

Experience replay (ER) is a fundamental component of off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL). ER recalls experiences from past iterations to compute gradient estimates for the current policy, increasing data-efficiency. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Guido Novati , Petros Koumoutsakos

Flow $Q$-learning has recently been introduced to integrate learning from expert demonstrations into an actor-critic structure. Central to this innovation is the ``the one-step policy'' network, which is optimized through a $Q$-function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-17 Farnaz Adib Yaghmaie , Arunava Naha

We establish a new connection between value and policy based reinforcement learning (RL) based on a relationship between softmax temporal value consistency and policy optimality under entropy regularization. Specifically, we show that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-27 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Kelvin Xu , Dale Schuurmans

Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Bin Hu , Kaiqing Zhang , Na Li , Mehran Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Tamer Başar

Deep reinforcement learning includes a broad family of algorithms that parameterise an internal representation, such as a value function or policy, by a deep neural network. Each algorithm optimises its parameters with respect to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Matteo Hessel , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh , David Silver

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

We investigate the combination of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms with uniform large-scale experience replay and propose solutions for two challenges: (a) efficient actor-critic learning with experience replay (b) stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Simon Schmitt , Matteo Hessel , Karen Simonyan

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been successful in a wide variety of simulated domains. However, a major obstacle facing deep RL in the real world is their high sample complexity. Batch policy gradient methods offer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-01 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Sergey Levine

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems. They rely on fresh on-policy data, making them sample-inefficient and requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Alessandro Montenegro , Federico Mansutti , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yaakov Engel , Michal Valko

Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Ehsan Imani , Eric Graves , Martha White

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou