Related papers: Stable and Efficient Policy Evaluation
This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…
Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…
We pursue a life-long learning approach to artificial intelligence that makes extensive use of reinforcement learning algorithms. We build on our prior work with general value functions (GVFs) and the Horde architecture. GVFs have been…
We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…
Emphatic algorithms are temporal-difference learning algorithms that change their effective state distribution by selectively emphasizing and de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. Recent works by Sutton, Mahmood and White…
Off-policy learning is a framework for evaluating and optimizing policies without deploying them, from data collected by another policy. Real-world environments are typically non-stationary and the offline learned policies should adapt to…
We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…
In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…
A central challenge to applying many off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problems is the variance introduced by importance sampling. In off-policy learning, the agent learns about a different policy than the one being…
Off-policy algorithms, in which a behavior policy differs from the target policy and is used to gain experience for learning, have proven to be of great practical value in reinforcement learning. However, even for simple convex problems…
In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…
We present a novel $l_1$ regularized off-policy convergent TD-learning method (termed RO-TD), which is able to learn sparse representations of value functions with low computational complexity. The algorithmic framework underlying RO-TD…
Continuous control of non-stationary environments is a major challenge for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The time-dependency of the state transition dynamics aggravates the notorious stability problems of model-free deep…
We consider the problem of continuous-time policy evaluation. This consists in learning through observations the value function associated with an uncontrolled continuous-time stochastic dynamic and a reward function. We propose two…
In the framework of Markov Decision Processes, off-policy learning, that is the problem of learning a linear approximation of the value function of some fixed policy from one trajectory possibly generated by some other policy. We briefly…
To estimate the value functions of policies from exploratory data, most model-free off-policy algorithms rely on importance sampling, where the use of importance sampling ratios often leads to estimates with severe variance. It is thus…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that TD can be viewed as an iterative optimization algorithm where…
Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…