Related papers: Multi-step Off-policy Learning Without Importance …
For an autonomous agent, executing a poor policy may be costly or even dangerous. For such agents, it is desirable to determine confidence interval lower bounds on the performance of any given policy without executing said policy. Current…
In reinforcement learning, the TD($\lambda$) algorithm is a fundamental policy evaluation method with an efficient online implementation that is suitable for large-scale problems. One practical drawback of TD($\lambda$) is its sensitivity…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a widely used method to evaluate policies in reinforcement learning. While many TD learning methods have been developed in recent years, little attention has been paid to preserving privacy and most of…
We derive an equation for temporal difference learning from statistical principles. Specifically, we start with the variational principle and then bootstrap to produce an updating rule for discounted state value estimates. The resulting…
Addressing such diverse ends as safety alignment with human preferences, and the efficiency of learning, a growing line of reinforcement learning research focuses on risk functionals that depend on the entire distribution of returns. Recent…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…
Temporal-difference (TD) methods learn state and action values efficiently by bootstrapping from their own future value predictions, but such a self-bootstrapping mechanism is prone to bootstrapping bias, where the errors in the value…
In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…
We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…
Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…
Learning from multi-step off-policy data collected by a set of policies is a core problem of reinforcement learning (RL). Approaches based on importance sampling (IS) often suffer from large variances due to products of IS ratios. Typical…
A great variety of off-policy learning algorithms exist in the literature, and new breakthroughs in this area continue to be made, improving theoretical understanding and yielding state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. In this…
The use of past experiences to accelerate temporal difference (TD) learning of value functions, or experience replay, is a key component in deep reinforcement learning. Prioritization or reweighting of important experiences has shown to…
Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…
This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…
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…
While on-policy algorithms are known for their stability, they often demand a substantial number of samples. In contrast, off-policy algorithms, which leverage past experiences, are considered sample-efficient but tend to exhibit…
Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…
We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…