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In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-04 Mao Hong , Zhengling Qi , Yanxun Xu

Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Navdeep Kumar , Esther Derman , Matthieu Geist , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems. They rely on fresh on-policy data, making them sample-inefficient and requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Alessandro Montenegro , Federico Mansutti , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We consider the problem of finding the best memoryless stochastic policy for an infinite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) with finite state and action spaces with respect to either the discounted or mean reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-02 Johannes Müller , Guido Montúfar

Although many real-world stochastic planning problems are more naturally formulated by hybrid models with both discrete and continuous variables, current state-of-the-art methods cannot adequately address these problems. We present the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Carlos E. Guestrin , Milos Hauskrecht , Branislav Kveton

Cooperative multi-agent problems often require coordination between agents, which can be achieved through a centralized policy that considers the global state. Multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods are commonly used to learn such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Xubo Lyu , Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi , Mo Chen , Yong Zhang

Many reinforcement learning (RL) environments in practice feature enormous state spaces that may be described compactly by a "factored" structure, that may be modeled by Factored Markov Decision Processes (FMDPs). We present the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Zihao Deng , Siddartha Devic , Brendan Juba

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning policies to control a large number of homogeneous robots. To this end, we propose a new algorithm we call Graph Policy Gradients (GPG) that exploits the underlying graph symmetry among the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Arbaaz Khan , Ekaterina Tolstaya , Alejandro Ribeiro , Vijay Kumar

Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Lucas Lehnert , Doina Precup

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods recently witness vigorous progress. However, there is a significant performance discrepancy between MAPG methods and state-of-the-art multi-agent value-based approaches. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Yihan Wang , Beining Han , Tonghan Wang , Heng Dong , Chongjie Zhang

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

We study minimax optimal reinforcement learning in episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs), which are MDPs with conditionally independent transition components. Assuming the factorization is known, we propose two model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yi Tian , Jian Qian , Suvrit Sra

We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Approaches to policy optimization have been motivated from diverse principles, based on how the parametric model is interpreted (e.g. value versus policy representation) or how the learning objective is formulated, yet they share a common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ramki Gummadi , Saurabh Kumar , Junfeng Wen , Dale Schuurmans

In this paper, we propose World Model Policy Gradient (WMPG), an approach to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimates using learned world models (WM's). In WMPG, a WM is trained online and used to imagine trajectories. The imagined…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-30 Michal Nauman , Floris Den Hengst

Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Debabrota Basu , Udvas Das , Brahim Driss , Uddalak Mukherjee

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank