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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

Ensuring safety of nonlinear systems under model uncertainty and external disturbances is crucial, especially for real-world control tasks. Predictive methods such as robust model predictive control (RMPC) require solving nonconvex…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-14 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Weiye Zhao , Changliu Liu

Off-policy Actor-Critic algorithms have demonstrated phenomenal experimental performance but still require better explanations. To this end, we show its policy evaluation error on the distribution of transitions decomposes into: a Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Ting-Han Fan , Peter J. Ramadge

This study proposes the use of a social learning method to estimate a global state within a multi-agent off-policy actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) operating in a partially observable environment. We assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Ainur Zhaikhan , Ali H. Sayed

Importance sampling (IS) is a widely used simulation method for estimating rare event probabilities. In IS, the relative variance of an estimator is the most common measure of estimator accuracy, and the focus of existing literature is on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-05 Julie Choi , Peter Glynn

A common strategy in transfer learning is few shot fine-tuning, but its success is highly dependent on the quality of samples selected as training examples. Active learning methods such as uncertainty sampling and diversity sampling can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wei Han , David Martinez , Anna Khanina , Lawrence Cavedon , Karin Verspoor

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Josiah P. Hanna , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone

Policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in challenging learning tasks such as continuous control, but suffer from high sample complexity. Experience replay is a commonly used approach to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-19 Saad Mohamad , Giovanni Montana

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), enhancing sample efficiency is crucial, particularly in scenarios when data acquisition is costly and risky. In principle, off-policy RL algorithms can improve sample efficiency by allowing multiple updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Hojoon Lee , Hanseul Cho , Hyunseung Kim , Daehoon Gwak , Joonkee Kim , Jaegul Choo , Se-Young Yun , Chulhee Yun

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by their need for an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Denis Steckelmacher , Hélène Plisnier , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Sriram Srinivasan , Marc Lanctot , Vinicius Zambaldi , Julien Perolat , Karl Tuyls , Remi Munos , Michael Bowling

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise in large language models (LLMs) post-training, which typically rely on token-level clipping to maintain stability during optimization. Despite the empirical success of GRPO-style methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jiakang Wang , Runze Liu , Qingpeng Cai , Lei Lin , Wenping Hu , Xiu Li , Fuzheng Zhang , Guorui Zhou , Kun Gai , Ling Pan

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL), which aims to find an optimal policy from a previously collected static dataset, bears algorithmic difficulties due to function approximation errors from out-of-distribution (OOD) data points. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Gaon An , Seungyong Moon , Jang-Hyun Kim , Hyun Oh Song

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

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianxiong Li , Honglei Yin

Self-play fine-tuning enables large language models to improve beyond supervised fine-tuning without additional human annotations by contrasting annotated responses with self-generated ones. Many existing methods rely on a fixed divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Wenjie Liao , Like Wu , Liangjie Zhao , Shihui Xu , Shigeru Fujimura

In reinforcement learning (RL), function approximation errors are known to easily lead to the Q-value overestimations, thus greatly reducing policy performance. This paper presents a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Jingliang Duan , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yangang Ren , Bo Cheng

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Riashat Islam , Komal K. Teru , Deepak Sharma , Joelle Pineau