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Related papers: Iterative Amortized Policy Optimization

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We introduce a new class of distributed algorithms for the approximate consensus problem in dynamic rooted networks, which we call amortized averaging algorithms. They are deduced from ordinary averaging algorithms by adding a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Bernadette Charron-Bost , Matthias Függer , Thomas Nowak

Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sagalpreet Singh , Rishi Saket , Aravindan Raghuveer

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

In this paper, the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is addressed to reconstruct the unknown cost function underlying an observed optimal policy in a model-free manner, whose online adaptation with completely off-policy system…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-20 Yibei Li , Yuexin Cao , Zhixin Liu , Lihua Xie

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Deep reinforcement learning agents frequently suffer from premature convergence, where early entropy collapse causes the policy to discard exploratory behaviors before discovering globally optimal strategies. We introduce Optimistic Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mai Pham , Vikrant Vaze , Peter Chin

We consider offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the agent does not interact with the environment and must rely on offline data collected using a behavior policy. Previous works provide policy evaluation guarantees when the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Xumei Xi , Christina Lee Yu , Yudong Chen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision tasks. However, recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of RL policies to different perturbations, raising concerns about their effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Buqing Nie , Yangqing Fu , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

Though reinforcement learning has greatly benefited from the incorporation of neural networks, the inability to verify the correctness of such systems limits their use. Current work in explainable deep learning focuses on explaining only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Nicholay Topin , Manuela Veloso

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

When transferring a control policy from simulation to a physical system, the policy needs to be robust to variations in the dynamics to perform well. Commonly, the optimal policy overfits to the approximate model and the corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Michael Lutter , Shie Mannor , Jan Peters , Dieter Fox , Animesh Garg

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) often require additional exploration strategies, especially if the actor is of deterministic nature. This work evaluates the use of model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Kevin Sebastian Luck , Mel Vecerik , Simon Stepputtis , Heni Ben Amor , Jonathan Scholz

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Yicheng Luo , Jackie Kay , Edward Grefenstette , Marc Peter Deisenroth

Developing theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity of offline RL methods is an important step towards making data-hungry RL algorithms practically viable. Currently, most results hinge on unrealistic assumptions about the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Sunil Madhow , Dan Qiao , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider the offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the agent aims to compute a policy that maximizes expected return while satisfying given cost constraints, learning only from a pre-collected dataset. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Jongmin Lee , Cosmin Paduraru , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Nicolas Heess , Doina Precup , Kee-Eung Kim , Arthur Guez

Distributionally robust policy learning aims to find a policy that performs well under the worst-case distributional shift, and yet most existing methods for robust policy learning consider the worst-case joint distribution of the covariate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyuan Wang , Zhimei Ren , Ruohan Zhan , Zhengyuan Zhou

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy learns to maximize cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. Towards conservative strategy, current methods choose to regularize the behavior policy or learn a lower bound of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Yuhang Jiang , Shuncheng He , Xiangyang Ji

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