Related papers: Parameter-Based Value Functions
We introduce Phasic Policy Gradient (PPG), a reinforcement learning framework which modifies traditional on-policy actor-critic methods by separating policy and value function training into distinct phases. In prior methods, one must choose…
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…
Estimating the value function for a fixed policy is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning. Policy evaluation algorithms---to estimate value functions---continue to be developed, to improve convergence rates, improve stability and…
By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…
We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…
Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…
For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills…
We study the offline reinforcement learning (RL) in the face of unmeasured confounders. Due to the lack of online interaction with the environment, offline RL is facing the following two significant challenges: (i) the agent may be…
Recent results in supervised learning suggest that while overparameterized models have the capacity to overfit, they in fact generalize quite well. We ask whether the same phenomenon occurs for offline contextual bandits. Our results are…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…
Feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL), i.e. choosing basis functions such that useful approximations of the unkown value function can be obtained, is one of the main challenges in scaling RL to real-world applications. Here we…
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,…
Value-based methods play a fundamental role in Markov decision processes (MDPs) and reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we present a unified control-theoretic framework for analyzing valued-based methods such as value computation…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms use value functions to guide the search for better policies. These methods estimate the value of a single policy while generalizing across many states. The core idea of this paper is to flip this…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…
Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for learning robotic skills while minimizing engineering effort. However, most reinforcement learning algorithms assume that a well-designed reward function is provided, and learn a single…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and…
Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…
A major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is the design of agents that are able to generalize across tasks that share common dynamics. A viable solution is meta-reinforcement learning, which identifies common structures among past…