English
Related papers

Related papers: All-Action Policy Gradient Methods: A Numerical In…

200 papers

Explicit exploration in the action space was assumed to be indispensable for online policy gradient methods to avoid a drastic degradation in sample complexity, for solving general reinforcement learning problems over finite state and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

Adapting an agent's behaviour to new environments has been one of the primary focus areas of physics based reinforcement learning. Although recent approaches such as universal policy networks partially address this issue by enabling the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh

We consider the problem of inferring the total causal effect of a single variable intervention on a (response) variable of interest. We propose a certain marginal integration regression technique for a very general class of potentially…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-10-05 Jan Ernest , Peter Bühlmann

In computational reinforcement learning, a growing body of work seeks to express an agent's model of the world through predictions about future sensations. In this manuscript we focus on predictions expressed as General Value Functions:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Alex Kearney , Anna Koop , Johannes Günther , Patrick M. Pilarski

Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 John Schulman , Philipp Moritz , Sergey Levine , Michael Jordan , Pieter Abbeel

This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that was inspired by previous tree structured architectures which were only useable in discrete action spaces. Policy Prediction Network offers a way to improve sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Zac Wellmer , James Kwok

In this paper, we study distributional reinforcement learning from the perspective of statistical efficiency. We investigate distributional policy evaluation, aiming to estimate the complete return distribution (denoted $\eta^\pi$) attained…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-13 Liangyu Zhang , Yang Peng , Jiadong Liang , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

Although there is now a large literature on policy evaluation and learning, much of the prior work assumes that the treatment assignment of one unit does not affect the outcome of another unit. Unfortunately, ignoring interference can lead…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-02 Yi Zhang , Kosuke Imai

To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

Influence functions approximate how removing a training example changes a quantity of interest, called the target function, such as a held-out loss. To estimate the influence of a group of examples, the standard practice is to sum the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jaeseung Heo , Kyeongheung Yun , Youngbin Choi , Sehyun Hwang , Jungseul Ok , Dongwoo Kim

Policy learning is an important component of many real-world learning systems. A major challenge in policy learning is how to adapt efficiently to unseen environments or tasks. Recently, it has been suggested to exploit invariant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-28 Sorawit Saengkyongam , Niklas Pfister , Predrag Klasnja , Susan Murphy , Jonas Peters

Communication is fundamental to sustaining reciprocity and cooperation in strategic interactions. We identify and formulate the influence attribution problem as the central optimization difficulty inherent in such dynamics for a learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yue Lin , Pascal Poupart , Shuhui Zhu , Dan Qiao , Wenhao Li , Yuan Liu , Hongyuan Zha , Baoxiang Wang

In this paper, we present a methodology to deploy the deterministic policy gradient method, using actor-critic techniques, when the optimal policy is approximated using a parametric optimization problem, where safety is enforced via hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-23 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon

A fundamental challenge in multiagent reinforcement learning is to learn beneficial behaviors in a shared environment with other simultaneously learning agents. In particular, each agent perceives the environment as effectively…

We adapt recent tools developed for the analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in non-convex optimization to obtain convergence and sample complexity guarantees for the vanilla policy gradient (PG). Our only assumptions are that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Rui Yuan , Robert M. Gower , Alessandro Lazaric

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

We cast policy gradient methods as the repeated application of two operators: a policy improvement operator $\mathcal{I}$, which maps any policy $\pi$ to a better one $\mathcal{I}\pi$, and a projection operator $\mathcal{P}$, which finds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Dibya Ghosh , Marlos C. Machado , Nicolas Le Roux

Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Chris Nota

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek