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Related papers: Variational Model-based Policy Optimization

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Model-based reinforcement learning has the potential to be more sample efficient than model-free approaches. However, existing model-based methods are vulnerable to model bias, which leads to poor generalization and asymptotic performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Tung-Long Vuong , Kenneth Tran

We introduce a Bayesian (deep) model-based reinforcement learning method (RoMBRL) that can capture model uncertainty to achieve sample-efficient policy optimisation. We propose to formulate the model-based policy optimisation problem as a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Tai Hoang , Ngo Anh Vien

Recent works in Reinforcement Learning (RL) combine model-free (Mf)-RL algorithms with model-based (Mb)-RL approaches to get the best from both: asymptotic performance of Mf-RL and high sample-efficiency of Mb-RL. Inspired by these works,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Soumya Rani Samineni

We propose a novel approach to addressing two fundamental challenges in Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL): the computational expense of repeatedly finding a good policy in the learned model, and the objective mismatch between model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Anirudh Vemula , Yuda Song , Aarti Singh , J. Andrew Bagnell , Sanjiban Choudhury

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a powerful paradigm for data-driven control. Compared to model-free approaches, offline model-based RL (MBRL) explicitly learns a world model from a static dataset and uses it as a surrogate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jiayu Chen , Le Xu , Aravind Venugopal , Jeff Schneider

Model-based reinforcement learning has attracted wide attention due to its superior sample efficiency. Despite its impressive success so far, it is still unclear how to appropriately schedule the important hyperparameters to achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-06 Hang Lai , Jian Shen , Weinan Zhang , Yimin Huang , Xing Zhang , Ruiming Tang , Yong Yu , Zhenguo Li

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents typically learn world models by minimizing predictive loss. However, powerful RL optimizers inevitably exploit minor model inaccuracies, leading to simulator exploitation and a reality gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Fan-Ming Luo , Tian Xu , Hang Lai , Xiong-Hui Chen , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

The goal of reinforcement learning (RL) is to let an agent learn an optimal control policy in an unknown environment so that future expected rewards are maximized. The model-free RL approach directly learns the policy based on data samples.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-22 Syogo Mori , Voot Tangkaratt , Tingting Zhao , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

This paper investigates the model-based methods in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We specify the dynamics sample complexity and the opponent sample complexity in MARL, and conduct a theoretic analysis of return discrepancy upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Weinan Zhang , Xihuai Wang , Jian Shen , Ming Zhou

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

In partially observable (PO) environments, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often suffer from unsatisfactory performance, since two problems need to be tackled together: how to extract information from the raw observations to solve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-25 Dongqi Han , Kenji Doya , Jun Tani

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has demonstrated superior sample efficiency compared to model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, the presence of inaccurate models can introduce biases during policy learning, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Yongshuai Liu , Xin Liu

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are widely used for their strong asymptotic performance and training stability, but they struggle to scale with larger batch sizes, as additional parallel environments yield redundant data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jianren Wang , Yifan Su , Abhinav Gupta , Deepak Pathak

We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…

Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Lei Lv , Huaping Liu , Fuchun Sun , Jianye Hao , Dong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Yao Mu , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Qi Sun , Bingbing Nie , Bo Cheng , Baiyu Peng

Model-based meta-reinforcement learning (RL) methods have recently been shown to be a promising approach to improving the sample efficiency of RL in multi-task settings. However, the theoretical understanding of those methods is yet to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Takuya Hiraoka , Takahisa Imagawa , Voot Tangkaratt , Takayuki Osa , Takashi Onishi , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka