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This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Traditional reinforcement learning lacks the ability to provide stability guarantees. More recent algorithms learn Lyapunov functions alongside the control policies to ensure stable learning. However, the current self-learned Lyapunov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-19 Sarvan Gill , Daniela Constantinescu

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG) has been widely used in continuous control tasks. However, the model-free DDPG algorithm suffers from high sample complexity. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Qingpeng Cai , Ling Pan , Pingzhong Tang

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

In offline model-based reinforcement learning (offline MBRL), we learn a dynamic model from historically collected data, and subsequently utilize the learned model and fixed datasets for policy learning, without further interacting with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Shentao Yang , Shujian Zhang , Yihao Feng , Mingyuan Zhou

Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Florent Delgrange , Raphael Avalos , Willem Röpke

We develop theory and algorithms for average-reward on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first consider bounding the difference of the long-term average reward for two policies. We show that previous work based on the discounted return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

A central challenge to applying many off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problems is the variance introduced by importance sampling. In off-policy learning, the agent learns about a different policy than the one being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Eric Graves , Sina Ghiassian

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Arip Asadulaev , Maksim Bobrin , Salem Lahlou , Dmitry Dylov , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac

Reinforcement learning is time-consuming for complex tasks due to the need for large amounts of training data. Recent advances in GPU-based simulation, such as Isaac Gym, have sped up data collection thousands of times on a commodity GPU.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Zechu Li , Tao Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Anurag Ajay , Pulkit Agrawal

Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Yunhao Tang , Tadashi Kozuno , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Policy-gradient methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are typically updated along a single stochastic gradient direction, leaving the rich local structure of the parameter space unexplored. Previous work has shown that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xinyu Zhang , Aishik Deb , Klaus Mueller

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

The high-dimensional or sparse reward task of a reinforcement learning (RL) environment requires a superior potential controller such as hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) rather than an atomic RL because it absorbs the complexity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 JaeYoon Kim , Junyu Xuan , Christy Liang , Farookh Hussain

We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We benchmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational…

The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-01 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Wentse Chen , Shiyu Huang , Yuan Chiang , Tim Pearce , Wei-Wei Tu , Ting Chen , Jun Zhu