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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we classify RL into direct and indirect RL according to how they seek the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jingliang Duan , Jie Li , Yangang Ren , Qi Sun , Bo Cheng

Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Bryon Tjanaka , Matthew C. Fontaine , Julian Togelius , Stefanos Nikolaidis

Policy evaluation is a crucial step in many reinforcement-learning procedures, which estimates a value function that predicts states' long-term value under a given policy. In this paper, we focus on policy evaluation with linear function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-12 Simon S. Du , Jianshu Chen , Lihong Li , Lin Xiao , Dengyong Zhou

Motivated by policy gradient methods in the context of reinforcement learning, we identify a large deviation rate function for the iterates generated by stochastic gradient descent for possibly non-convex objectives satisfying a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Wouter Jongeneel , Daniel Kuhn , Mengmeng Li

Policy-based methods have achieved remarkable success in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Among these methods, off-policy policy gradient methods are particularly important due to that they can benefit from off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Wenjia Meng , Qian Zheng , Long Yang , Yilong Yin , Gang Pan

Policy gradient methods are an attractive approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their convergence properties and robustness in partially observable scenarios. However, there is a significant performance gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Bozhidar Vasilev , Tarun Gupta , Bei Peng , Shimon Whiteson

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-10 Brendan O'Donoghue , Remi Munos , Koray Kavukcuoglu , Volodymyr Mnih

Reinforcement learning policies are often represented by neural networks, but programmatic policies are preferred in some cases because they are more interpretable, amenable to formal verification, or generalize better. While efficient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rasmus Larsen , Mikkel Nørgaard Schmidt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Qingpeng Cai , Ling Pan , Pingzhong Tang

Inverse Reinforcement Learning addresses the problem of inferring an expert's reward function from demonstrations. However, in many applications, we not only have access to the expert's near-optimal behavior, but we also observe part of her…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Giorgia Ramponi , Gianluca Drappo , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Policy gradient algorithms have found wide adoption in NLP, but have recently become subject to criticism, doubting their suitability for NMT. Choshen et al. (2020) identify multiple weaknesses and suspect that their success is determined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Samuel Kiegeland , Julia Kreutzer

We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Debmalya Mandal , Stelios Triantafyllou , Goran Radanovic

Task-specific scores are often used to optimize for and evaluate the performance of conditional text generation systems. However, such scores are non-differentiable and cannot be used in the standard supervised learning paradigm. Hence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 James O' Neill , Danushka Bollegala

Reinforcement learning has been widely used in many problems, including quantum control of qubits. However, such problems can, at the same time, be solved by traditional, non-machine-learning methods, such as stochastic gradient descent and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-05-06 Xiao-Ming Zhang , Zezhu Wei , Raza Asad , Xu-Chen Yang , Xin Wang

Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Amirreza Valaei , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sadegh Soudjani

Reinforcement learning is a growing field in AI with a lot of potential. Intelligent behavior is learned automatically through trial and error in interaction with the environment. However, this learning process is often costly. Using…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-12-08 Nico Meyer , Daniel D. Scherer , Axel Plinge , Christopher Mutschler , Michael J. Hartmann

Value functions are central to Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning but their exact estimation suffers from the curse of dimensionality, challenging the development of practical value-function (VF) estimation algorithms. Several…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Sergio Rozada , Victor Tenorio , Antonio G. Marques

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara