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Related papers: Near Optimal Policy Optimization via REPS

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Local Policy Search is a popular reinforcement learning approach for handling large state spaces. Formally, it searches locally in a paramet erized policy space in order to maximize the associated value function averaged over some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-07 Bruno Scherrer , Matthieu Geist

We work towards a unifying paradigm for accelerating policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating foresight in the policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates. Leveraging the connection between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Veronica Chelu , Tom Zahavy , Arthur Guez , Doina Precup , Sebastian Flennerhag

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

Trust region policy optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in Reinforcement Learning (RL) in which a surrogate problem, that restricts consecutive policies to be 'close' to one another, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-13 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

It is challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to succeed in real-world applications like financial trading and logistic system due to the noisy observation and environment shifting between training and evaluation. Thus, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zhengyu Yang , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Minghuan Liu , Weiqing Liu , Jiang Bian , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Shutong Ding , Jingya Wang , Yali Du , Ye Shi

Many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require making decisions in continuous action environments. In particular, determining the optimal dose level plays a vital role in developing medical treatment regimes. One…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Yuhan Li , Wenzhuo Zhou , Ruoqing Zhu

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have recently been recognized as a valuable and promising approach to discovering a policy with creditable performance, particularly in the presence of a dynamic environment and estimation errors in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Zhenwei Lin , Chenyu Xue , Qi Deng , Yinyu Ye

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Roland Stolz , Michael Eichelbeck , Matthias Althoff

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful paradigm for optimizing large language models (LLMs) to handle complex reasoning tasks. A core challenge in this process lies in managing policy entropy, which reflects the balance between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Zhenpeng Su , Leiyu Pan , Minxuan Lv , Yuntao Li , Wenping Hu , Fuzheng Zhang , Kun Gai , Guorui Zhou

Autonomous learning of robotic skills can allow general-purpose robots to learn wide behavioral repertoires without requiring extensive manual engineering. However, robotic skill learning methods typically make one of several trade-offs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-07 William Montgomery , Anurag Ajay , Chelsea Finn , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

This paper introduces a new approach to solve sensor management problems. Classically sensor management problems can be well formalized as Partially-Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMPD). The original approach developped here consists…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-03-20 Thomas Bréhard , Emmanuel Duflos , Philippe Vanheeghe , Pierre-Arnaud Coquelin

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Guy Lorberbom , Chris J. Maddison , Nicolas Heess , Tamir Hazan , Daniel Tarlow