Related papers: From Importance Sampling to Doubly Robust Policy G…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning robotics controllers. It has recently been shown that algorithms based on finite-difference estimates of the policy gradient are competitive with algorithms based on the policy…
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…
Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not…
We study the evaluation of a policy under best- and worst-case perturbations to a Markov decision process (MDP), using transition observations from the original MDP, whether they are generated under the same or a different policy. This is…
Standard policy gradients weight each sampled action by advantage alone, regardless of how likely that action was under the current policy. This creates two pathologies: within a single decision context (e.g. one image or prompt), a rare…
Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot…
The doubly-robust (DR) estimator is popular for evaluating causal effects in observational studies and is often perceived as more desirable than inverse probability weighting (IPW) or outcome modeling alone because it provides extra…
This work adopts the very successful distributional perspective on reinforcement learning and adapts it to the continuous control setting. We combine this within a distributed framework for off-policy learning in order to develop what we…
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…
We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…
Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare…
We introduce Group Policy Gradient (GPG), a family of critic-free policy-gradient estimators for general MDPs. Inspired by the success of GRPO's approach in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), GPG replaces a learned value…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…
Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally…
Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…
Importance sampling-based estimators for off-policy evaluation (OPE) are valued for their simplicity, unbiasedness, and reliance on relatively few assumptions. However, the variance of these estimators is often high, especially when…
Hybrid RL is the setting where an RL agent has access to both offline data and online data by interacting with the real-world environment. In this work, we propose a new hybrid RL algorithm that combines an on-policy actor-critic method…
In recommendation systems (RS), user behavior data is observational rather than experimental, resulting in widespread bias in the data. Consequently, tackling bias has emerged as a major challenge in the field of recommendation systems.…
Despite extreme sample inefficiency, on-policy reinforcement learning, aka policy gradients, has become a fundamental tool in decision-making problems. With the recent advances in GPU-driven simulation, the ability to collect large amounts…
In the paper, we propose a class of efficient momentum-based policy gradient methods for the model-free reinforcement learning, which use adaptive learning rates and do not require any large batches. Specifically, we propose a fast…