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Related papers: Generalized Off-Policy Actor-Critic

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Training a game-playing reinforcement learning agent requires multiple interactions with the environment. Ignorant random exploration may cause a waste of time and resources. It's essential to alleviate such waste. As discussed in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Tairan Huang , Xu Li , Hao Li , Mingming Sun , Ping Li

The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Olivier Jeunen , Aleksei Ustimenko

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are typically characterized as algorithms that perform policy updates using i.i.d. trajectories collected by the agent's current policy. However, after observing only a finite number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Nicholas E. Corrado , Josiah P. Hanna

Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Jyun-Li Lin , Wei Hung , Shang-Hsuan Yang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Alonso Granados , Jason Pacheco

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

Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Chi Zhang , Sanmukh Rao Kuppannagari , Viktor K Prasanna

We propose two policy gradient algorithms for solving the problem of control in an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) context. Both algorithms incorporate a smoothed functional (SF) based gradient estimation scheme. The first algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

Supervised imitation-based approaches are often favored over off-policy reinforcement learning approaches for learning policies offline, since their straightforward optimization objective makes them computationally efficient and stable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Adam Jelley , Trevor McInroe , Sam Devlin , Amos Storkey

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

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, offers the prospect of policy optimization from large pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction. It addresses challenges with regard to the cost of data…

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

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

We consider off-policy policy evaluation with function approximation (FA) in average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to estimate both the reward rate and the differential value function. For this problem, bootstrapping is necessary and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Shangtong Zhang , Yi Wan , Richard S. Sutton , Shimon Whiteson

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is attracting growing interest, driven by practical constraints in real-world applications, the complexity of LLM-RL infrastructure, and the need for further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Chaorui Yao , Yanxi Chen , Yuchang Sun , Yushuo Chen , Wenhao Zhang , Xuchen Pan , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding

In this work, we take a fresh look at some old and new algorithms for off-policy, return-based reinforcement learning. Expressing these in a common form, we derive a novel algorithm, Retrace($\lambda$), with three desired properties: (1) it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-09 Rémi Munos , Tom Stepleton , Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare

Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion- and flow-based control policies, have emerged as effective parameterizations for robot learning. This work introduces Off-policy Generative Policy Optimization (OGPO), a…

We develop a new class of model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms for data-driven, learning-based control. Our Generalized Policy Improvement algorithms combine the policy improvement guarantees of on-policy methods with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras