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Related papers: SOAC: The Soft Option Actor-Critic Architecture

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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

This paper introduces the SOAR framework for imitation learning. SOAR is an algorithmic template that learns a policy from expert demonstrations with a primal dual style algorithm that alternates cost and policy updates. Within the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Stefano Viel , Luca Viano , Volkan Cevher

Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Nathaniel D. Bastian , Bruno Castro da Silva , Emma Brunskil , Philip S. Thomas

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Hoang M. Le , Cameron Voloshin , Yisong Yue

Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Tengyu Xu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Yingbin Liang

Standard reinforcement learning algorithms with a single policy perform poorly on tasks in complex environments involving sparse rewards, diverse behaviors, or long-term planning. This led to the study of algorithms that incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Anurita Ghosh , Ambedkar Dukkipati

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning is the ability of an agent to learn and use high-level behaviors, called options. The option-critic architecture provides a gradient-based end-to-end learning method to construct options. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-11 Raviteja Chunduru , Doina Precup

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Debidatta Dwibedi , Sergey Levine , Jonathan Tompson

We present new results on learning temporally extended actions for continuoustasks, using the options framework (Suttonet al.[1999b], Precup [2000]). In orderto achieve this goal we work with the option-critic architecture (Baconet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-04 Martin Klissarov , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Jean Harb , Doina Precup

Eigenoptions (EOs) have been recently introduced as a promising idea for generating a diverse set of options through the graph Laplacian, having been shown to allow efficient exploration. Despite its initial promising results, a couple of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-13 Miao Liu , Marlos C. Machado , Gerald Tesauro , Murray Campbell

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Wenshuo Guo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

We propose a new policy iteration theory as an important extension of soft policy iteration and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), one of the most efficient model free algorithms for deep reinforcement learning. Supported by the new theory, arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng

The oscillating performance of off-policy learning and persisting errors in the actor-critic (AC) setting call for algorithms that can conservatively learn to suit the stability-critical applications better. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Lingwei Zhu , Toshinori Kitamura , Takamitsu Matsubara

Deploying reinforcement learning in the real world remains challenging due to sample inefficiency, sparse rewards, and noisy visual observations. Prior work leverages demonstrations and human feedback to improve learning efficiency and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Xiefeng Wu , Mingyu Hu , Shu Zhang

Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Otmane Sakhi , Aleksei Arzhantsev , Imad Aouali , Flavian Vasile

This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that was inspired by previous tree structured architectures which were only useable in discrete action spaces. Policy Prediction Network offers a way to improve sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Zac Wellmer , James Kwok

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these methods in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Kamil Ciosek , Quan Vuong , Robert Loftin , Katja Hofmann