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Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Bernhard Schölkopf , Sergey Levine

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Debidatta Dwibedi , Sergey Levine , Jonathan Tompson

Actor-critic algorithms that make use of distributional policy evaluation have frequently been shown to outperform their non-distributional counterparts on many challenging control tasks. Examples of this behavior include the D4PG and DMPO…

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Jianfei Ma

Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Dongdong Li , Jiuxiang Dong

Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Erinc Merdivan , Sten Hanke , Matthieu Geist

We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

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

Many practical applications of reinforcement learning constrain agents to learn from a fixed batch of data which has already been gathered, without offering further possibility for data collection. In this paper, we demonstrate that due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Scott Fujimoto , David Meger , Doina Precup

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms combined with value function approximation have recently achieved impressive performance in a variety of application domains. However, the theoretical understanding of such algorithms is limited,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Botao Hao , Nevena Lazic , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Pooria Joulani , Csaba Szepesvari

To estimate the value functions of policies from exploratory data, most model-free off-policy algorithms rely on importance sampling, where the use of importance sampling ratios often leads to estimates with severe variance. It is thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-13 Ashique Rupam Mahmood , Huizhen Yu , Richard S. Sutton

By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Jared Markowitz , Jesse Silverberg , Gary Collins

In this work, we propose Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic (BAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm. BAC mathematically formulates the behavior of the policy through autoencoders by providing an accurate estimation of how frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Ammar Fayad , Majd Ibrahim

We develop a parameterized Primal-Dual $\pi$ Learning method based on deep neural networks for Markov decision process with large state space and off-policy reinforcement learning. In contrast to the popular Q-learning and actor-critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-08 Woon Sang Cho , Mengdi Wang

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

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

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…