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Related papers: Combining policy gradient and Q-learning

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The deep Q-network (DQN) and return-based reinforcement learning are two promising algorithms proposed in recent years. DQN brings advances to complex sequential decision problems, while return-based algorithms have advantages in making use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Wenjia Meng , Qian Zheng , Long Yang , Pengfei Li , Gang Pan

To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Qing Wang , Yingru Li , Jiechao Xiong , Tong Zhang

In this work, we take a fresh look at some old and new algorithms for off-policy, return-based reinforcement learning. Expressing these in a common form, we derive a novel algorithm, Retrace($\lambda$), with three desired properties: (1) it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-09 Rémi Munos , Tom Stepleton , Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare

This paper considers policy search in continuous state-action reinforcement learning problems. Typically, one computes search directions using a classic expression for the policy gradient called the Policy Gradient Theorem, which decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-13 Sujay Bhatt , Alec Koppel , Vikram Krishnamurthy

This paper investigates trajectory tracking problem for a class of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with unknown dynamics and constrained inputs. Different from existing policy gradient methods which employ single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Wenjie Shi , Shiji Song , Cheng Wu , C. L. Philip Chen

Experience replay is central to off-policy algorithms in deep reinforcement learning (RL), but there remain significant gaps in our understanding. We therefore present a systematic and extensive analysis of experience replay in Q-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 William Fedus , Prajit Ramachandran , Rishabh Agarwal , Yoshua Bengio , Hugo Larochelle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

The core challenge of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is dealing with the (potentially catastrophic) extrapolation error induced by the distribution shift between the history dataset and the desired policy. A large portion of prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Laixi Shi , Robert Dadashi , Yuejie Chi , Pablo Samuel Castro , Matthieu Geist

We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Sanghyun Son , Laura Yu Zheng , Ryan Sullivan , Yi-Ling Qiao , Ming C. Lin

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables training from fixed data without online interaction, but policies learned offline often struggle when deployed in dynamic environments due to distributional shift and unreliable value estimates on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Lipeng Zu , Hansong Zhou , Xiaonan Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has opened up new opportunities to enhance existing smart systems that generally include a complex decision-making process. However, modern RL algorithms, e.g., Deep Q-Networks (DQN), are based on deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Yang Ni , Danny Abraham , Mariam Issa , Yeseong Kim , Pietro Mercati , Mohsen Imani

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

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

Despite extreme sample inefficiency, on-policy reinforcement learning, aka policy gradients, has become a fundamental tool in decision-making problems. With the recent advances in GPU-driven simulation, the ability to collect large amounts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Jayesh Singla , Ananye Agarwal , Deepak Pathak

This paper explores the problem of simultaneously learning a value function and policy in deep actor-critic reinforcement learning models. We find that the common practice of learning these functions jointly is sub-optimal, due to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Matthew Aitchison , Penny Sweetser

Quality-Diversity (QD) is a concept from Neuroevolution with some intriguing applications to Reinforcement Learning. It facilitates learning a population of agents where each member is optimized to simultaneously accumulate high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Tanmay Gangwani , Jian Peng , Yuan Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments through interaction with the environment. In most real-world applications, however, a high number of interactions are infeasible. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Md Ferdous Alam , Parinaz Naghizadeh , David Hoelzle

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) improves sample efficiency by leveraging pre-collected datasets prior to online interaction. A key challenge, however, is learning an accurate critic in large state--action spaces with limited…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Andrew Choi , Wei Xu