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Related papers: Direct and indirect reinforcement learning

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We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to compute the expression of quasi-stationary distribution. Based on the fixed-point formulation of quasi-stationary distribution, we minimize the KL-divergence of two Markovian path…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Zhiqiang Cai , Ling Lin , Xiang Zhou

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to estimate the reward function of optimizing agents by observing their response (estimates or actions). This paper considers IRL when noisy estimates of the gradient of a reward function generated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Vikram Krishnamurthy , George Yin

Policy iteration (PI) is a recursive process of policy evaluation and improvement for solving an optimal decision-making/control problem, or in other words, a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. PI has also served as the fundamental for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Jaeyoung Lee , Richard S. Sutton

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

We study the problem of computing the value function from a discretely-observed trajectory of a continuous-time diffusion process. We develop a new class of algorithms based on easily implementable numerical schemes that are compatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Wenlong Mou , Yuhua Zhu

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Sebastian Jaimungal , Silvana Pesenti , Ye Sheng Wang , Hariom Tatsat

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Sequential decision making, commonly formalized as Markov Decision Process (MDP) optimization, is a important challenge in artificial intelligence. Two key approaches to this problem are reinforcement learning (RL) and planning. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Thomas M. Moerland , Joost Broekens , Aske Plaat , Catholijn M. Jonker

Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Wenhao Zhan , Shicong Cen , Baihe Huang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Yuejie Chi

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) addresses the problem of sequential decision-making by learning optimal policy through pre-collected data, without interacting with the environment. As yet, it has remained somewhat impractical, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Maksim Bobrin , Nazar Buzun , Dmitrii Krylov , Dmitry V. Dylov

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved great success in solving complicated decision-making problems. Despite the successes, DRL is frequently criticized for many reasons, e.g., data inefficient, inflexible and intractable reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Weiqin Chen

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has received increasing attention for learning policies from previously collected data without interaction with the real environment, which is particularly important in high-stakes applications. While a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Qing Zhu , Xian Yu

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

We show that several major algorithms of reinforcement learning (RL) fit into the framework of categorical cybernetics, that is to say, parametrised bidirectional processes. We build on our previous work in which we show that value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Jules Hedges , Riu Rodríguez Sakamoto

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms either learn how to map states to expected rewards or search for policies that can maximize a certain performance function. Model-Based algorithms instead, aim to learn an approximation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Juan Cardenas-Cartagena , Massimiliano Falzari , Marco Zullich , Matthia Sabatelli

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Ted Moskovitz , Brendan O'Donoghue , Vivek Veeriah , Sebastian Flennerhag , Satinder Singh , Tom Zahavy

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning in complex environments is a challenging problem. In particular, the success of reinforcement learning algorithms depends on a well-designed reward function. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) solves the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Rakhoon Hwang , Hanjin Lee , Hyung Ju Hwang