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Related papers: Importance Resampling for Off-policy Prediction

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Among Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods,Sampling Importance Resampling (SIR) algorithms are based on Importance Sampling (IS) and on some resampling-based)rejuvenation algorithm which aims at fighting against weight degeneracy. However…

Computation · Statistics 2018-02-14 Roland Lamberti , Yohan Petetin , François Desbouvries , François Septier

Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo methodology that allows for approximation of a target distribution using weighted samples generated from another proposal distribution. Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) implements an iterative…

Computation · Statistics 2018-06-04 Yousef El-Laham , Victor Elvira , Monica F. Bugallo

In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Xu-Hui Liu , Zhenghai Xue , Jing-Cheng Pang , Shengyi Jiang , Feng Xu , Yang Yu

The utilization of the experience replay mechanism enables agents to effectively leverage their experiences on several occasions. In previous studies, the sampling probability of the transitions was modified based on their relative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Arda Sarp Yenicesu , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat , Ozgur S. Oguz

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…

Computation · Statistics 2024-06-21 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino

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

The principal contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework for off-policy reinforcement learning, based on conditional expectations of importance sampling ratios. This framework yields new perspectives and understanding of existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Hado van Hasselt , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul , Rémi Munos , Will Dabney

This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning with a focus on behavior policy estimation for importance sampling. Prior work has shown empirically that estimating a history-dependent behavior policy can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Hongyi Zhou , Josiah P. Hanna , Jin Zhu , Ying Yang , Chengchun Shi

Importance sampling (IS) is a technique that enables statistical estimation of output performance at multiple input distributions from a single nominal input distribution. IS is commonly used in Monte Carlo simulation for variance reduction…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-07 Yijuan Liang , Guangxin Jiang , Michael C. Fu

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo methodology for the approximation of intractable integrals, very often involving a target probability density function. The performance of IS heavily depends on the appropriate selection of…

Computation · Statistics 2023-06-22 Víctor Elvira , Emilie Chouzenoux , Ömer Deniz Akyildiz , Luca Martino

Experience replay is a foundational technique in reinforcement learning that enhances learning stability by storing past experiences in a replay buffer and reusing them during training. Despite its practical success, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-14 Jiale Han , Xiaowu Dai , Yuhua Zhu

Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Eshwar S R , Shishir Kolathaya , Gugan Thoppe

In reinforcement learning (RL), experience replay-based sampling techniques play a crucial role in promoting convergence by eliminating spurious correlations. However, widely used methods such as uniform experience replay (UER) and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Ramnath Kumar , Dheeraj Nagaraj

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

In this paper, we aim to develop a simple and scalable reinforcement learning algorithm that uses standard supervised learning methods as subroutines. Our goal is an algorithm that utilizes only simple and convergent maximum likelihood loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Xue Bin Peng , Aviral Kumar , Grace Zhang , Sergey Levine

We explore efficient estimation of statistical quantities, particularly rare event probabilities, for stochastic reaction networks. Consequently, we propose an importance sampling (IS) approach to improve the Monte Carlo (MC) estimator…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Chiheb Ben Hammouda , Nadhir Ben Rached , Raúl Tempone , Sophia Wiechert

Iterated sampling importance resampling (i-SIR) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm which is based on $N$ independent proposals. As $N$ grows, its samples become nearly independent, but with an increased computational cost. We…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-24 Pietari Laitinen , Matti Vihola