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Related papers: Learning to Explore with Meta-Policy Gradient

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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

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

Uncertainty quantification is one of the central challenges for machine learning in real-world applications. In reinforcement learning, an agent confronts two kinds of uncertainty, called epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Takuya Kanazawa , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta

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

This paper tackles the challenge of learning non-Markovian optimal execution strategies in dynamic financial markets. We introduce a novel actor-critic algorithm based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) to address this issue, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Alessandro Micheli , Mélodie Monod

We study a reinforcement learning setting, where the state transition function is a convex combination of a stochastic continuous function and a deterministic function. Such a setting generalizes the widely-studied stochastic state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-03 Qingpeng Cai , Ling Pan , Pingzhong Tang

While many sophisticated exploration methods have been proposed, their lack of generality and high computational cost often lead researchers to favor simpler methods like $\epsilon$-greedy. Motivated by this, we introduce $\beta$-DQN, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Hongming Zhang , Fengshuo Bai , Chenjun Xiao , Chao Gao , Bo Xu , Martin Müller

Deterministic Policy Gradient (DPG) removes a level of randomness from standard randomized-action Policy Gradient (PG), and demonstrates substantial empirical success for tackling complex dynamic problems involving Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Harshat Kumar , Dionysios S. Kalogerias , George J. Pappas , Alejandro Ribeiro

In many real recommender systems, novel items are added frequently over time. The importance of sufficiently presenting novel actions has widely been acknowledged for improving long-term user engagement. A recent work builds on Off-Policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Haruka Kiyohara , Yusuke Narita , Yuta Saito , Kei Tateno , Takuma Udagawa

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) involves complex agent interactions and requires effective exploration strategies. A prominent class of MARL algorithms, decentralized softmax policy gradient (DecSPG), addresses this…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yuyang Zhang , Haldun Balim , Na Li

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Background: Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient-based reinforcement learning algorithms utilize Actor-Critic architectures, where both networks are typically trained using identical batches of replayed transitions. However, the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Mehmet Efe Lorasdagi , Dogan Can Cicek , Furkan Burak Mutlu , Suleyman Serdar Kozat

In continuous action domains, standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms like DDPG suffer from inefficient exploration when facing sparse or deceptive reward problems. Conversely, evolutionary and developmental methods focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 Cédric Colas , Olivier Sigaud , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

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

Due to the sparse rewards and high degree of environment variation, reinforcement learning approaches such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) are plagued by issues of high variance when applied in complex real world environments.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-28 Linhai Xie , Yishu Miao , Sen Wang , Phil Blunsom , Zhihua Wang , Changhao Chen , Andrew Markham , Niki Trigoni

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

Deterministic policy gradient (DPG) is widely utilized for continuous control; however, it inherently relies on the differentiability of the critic with respect to the action during policy updates. This assumption is violated in practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hyunjun Na , Donghwan Lee

We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-27 Hung Tran-The , Sunil Gupta , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh