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Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with learning a rewarding policy by executing another policy that gathers samples of experience. While the former policy (i.e. target policy) is rewarding but in-expressive (in most cases,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Anji Liu , Yitao Liang , Guy Van den Broeck

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Policy evaluation algorithms are essential to reinforcement learning due to their ability to predict the performance of a policy. However, there are two long-standing issues lying in this prediction problem that need to be tackled:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Daoming Lyu , Bo Liu , Matthieu Geist , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz , Qi Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically models the interaction between the agent and environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), where the rewards that guide the agent's behavior are always observable. However, in many real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Montaser Mohammedalamen , Michael Bowling

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. We consider for the first time the semiparametric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

We apply functional acceleration to the Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) general family of algorithms, which cover a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Leveraging duality, we propose a momentum-based PMD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Veronica Chelu , Doina Precup

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

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

On-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms have low data utilization and require significant experience for policy improvement. This paper proposes a proximal policy optimization algorithm with prioritized trajectory replay (PTR-PPO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Xingxing Liang , Yang Ma , Yanghe Feng , Zhong Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms still suffer from high sample complexity despite outstanding recent successes. The need for intensive interactions with the environment is especially observed in many widely popular policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Samuele Tosatto , Joao Carvalho , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Sungee Hong , Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC perspective to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Alessio Russo , Aldo Pacchiano

Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Olivier Jeunen

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

We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Shalabh Bhatnagar

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman