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Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, particularly in the experience replay setting now commonly used with deep neural networks. Classically, off-policy estimation bias is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

State-action value functions (i.e., Q-values) are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning (RL), giving rise to popular algorithms such as SARSA and Q-learning. We propose a new notion of action value defined by a Gaussian smoothed version of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , George Tucker , Dale Schuurmans

In this paper, we propose a new solution to reward adaptation (RA) in reinforcement learning, where the agent adapts to a target reward function based on one or more existing source behaviors learned a priori under the same domain dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Kevin Vora , Yu Zhang

Many algorithms for data analysis exist, especially for classification problems. To solve a data analysis problem, a proper algorithm should be chosen, and also its hyperparameters should be selected. In this paper, we present a new method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-08 Valeria Efimova , Andrey Filchenkov , Anatoly Shalyto

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Haoxin Lin , Yihao Sun , Jiaji Zhang , Yang Yu

One of the main obstacles to broad application of reinforcement learning methods is the parameter sensitivity of our core learning algorithms. In many large-scale applications, online computation and function approximation represent key…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-10-25 Martha White , Adam White

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) facilitates efficient inference by distilling multi-step diffusion models into few-step variants. Concurrently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a vital tool for aligning generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Dengyang Jiang , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Qilong Wu , Liuzhuozheng Li , Hengzhuang Li , Xin Jin , David Liu , Changsheng Lu , Zhen Li , Bo Zhang , Mengmeng Wang , Steven Hoi , Peng Gao , Harry Yang

Asynchronous parallel optimization algorithms for solving large-scale machine learning problems have drawn significant attention from academia to industry recently. This paper proposes a novel algorithm, decoupled asynchronous proximal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Yitan Li , Linli Xu , Xiaowei Zhong , Qing Ling

Multistep returns, such as $n$-step returns and $\lambda$-returns, are commonly used to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The variance of the multistep returns becomes the limiting factor in their length;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Brett Daley , Martha White , Marlos C. Machado

In Reinforcement Learning the Q-learning algorithm provably converges to the optimal solution. However, as others have demonstrated, Q-learning can also overestimate the values and thereby spend too long exploring unhelpful states. Double…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 David Barber

Achieving fast and stable off-policy learning in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging. Most existing methods rely on semi-gradient temporal-difference (TD) methods for their simplicity and efficiency, but are consequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Esraa Elelimy , Brett Daley , Andrew Patterson , Marlos C. Machado , Adam White , Martha White

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Emmanuel Bengio , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

While many algorithmic extensions to Deep Q-Networks (DQN) have been proposed, there remains limited understanding of how different improvements interact. In particular, multi-step and ensemble style extensions have shown promise in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Adrian Ly , Richard Dazeley , Peter Vamplew , Francisco Cruz , Sunil Aryal

In recent years deep neural networks have been successfully applied to the domains of reinforcement learning \cite{bengio2009learning,krizhevsky2012imagenet,hinton2006reducing}. Deep reinforcement learning \cite{mnih2015human} is reported…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Huihui Zhang , Wu Huang

The $\lambda$-calculus is a handy formalism to specify the evaluation of higher-order programs. It is not very handy, however, when one interprets the specification as an execution mechanism, because terms can grow exponentially with the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Andrea Condoluci , Beniamino Accattoli , Claudio Sacerdoti Coen

The trend towards large language models (LLMs) for guardrailing against undesired behaviors is increasing and has shown promise for censoring user inputs. However, increased latency, memory consumption, hosting expenses and non-structured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-30 James O' Neill , Santhosh Subramanian , Eric Lin , Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Reinforcement learning in discrete-continuous hybrid action spaces presents fundamental challenges for robotic manipulation, where high-level task decisions and low-level joint-space execution must be jointly optimized. Existing approaches…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Thanh-Tuan Tran , Thanh Nguyen Canh , Nak Young Chong , Xiem HoangVan

Value functions derived from Markov decision processes arise as a central component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in many statistics and engineering applications of machine learning techniques. Computation of the solution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Adithya M. Devraj , Ioannis Kontoyiannis , Sean P. Meyn