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Related papers: Bayesian Distributional Policy Gradients

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In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

While most reinforcement learning methods today flatten the distribution of future returns to a single scalar value, distributional RL methods exploit the return distribution to provide stronger learning signals and to enable applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Perry Dong , Chongyi Zheng , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh , Benjamin Eysenbach

Sequential decision making in the presence of uncertainty and stochastic dynamics gives rise to distributions over state/action trajectories in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control problems. This observation has led to a variety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Jad Rahme , Ryan P. Adams

Quantifying uncertainty about a policy's long-term performance is important to solve sequential decision-making tasks. We study the problem from a model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning perspective, where the goal is to learn the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Carlos E. Luis , Alessandro G. Bottero , Julia Vinogradska , Felix Berkenkamp , Jan Peters

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

Chaotic dynamical systems pose a fundamental challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL): exponential sensitivity to initial conditions induces high-variance bootstrap targets and poorly conditioned gradient updates. Chaotic dynamics arise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 James Rudd-Jones , Mirco Musolesi , María Pérez-Ortiz

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Philip Amortila , Doina Precup , Prakash Panangaden , Marc G. Bellemare

The remarkable empirical performance of distributional reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered increasing attention to understanding its theoretical advantages over classical RL. By decomposing the categorical distributional loss commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Ke Sun , Yingnan Zhao , Enze Shi , Yafei Wang , Xiaodong Yan , Bei Jiang , Linglong Kong

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Tong Yu , Lina Yao

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Wojciech M. Czarnecki , Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Satinder Singh , David Silver

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

Research in reinforcement learning has produced algorithms for optimal decision making under uncertainty that fall within two main types. The first employs a Bayesian framework, where optimality improves with increased computational time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-09-22 Christos Dimitrakakis

One of the main challenges in imitation learning is determining what action an agent should take when outside the state distribution of the demonstrations. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) can enable generalization to new states by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum , Marek Petrik

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

In this paper, we consider jointly optimizing cell load balance and network throughput via a reinforcement learning (RL) approach, where inter-cell handover (i.e., user association assignment) and massive MIMO antenna tilting are configured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Zhou Zhou , Yan Xin , Hao Chen , Charlie Zhang , Lingjia Liu

In the Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) setting, a prior distribution over the unknown problem parameters -- the rewards and transitions -- is assumed, and a policy that optimizes the (posterior) expected return is sought. A common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Aviv Tamar , Daniel Soudry , Ev Zisselman

One of the key challenges that Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces is its limited capability to adapt to a change of data distribution caused by uncertainties. This challenge arises especially in RL systems using deep neural networks as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Amornyos Horprasert , Esa Apriaskar , Xingyu Liu , Lanlan Su , Lyudmila S. Mihaylova

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (RL) is capable of not only incorporating domain knowledge, but also solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma in a natural way. As Bayesian RL is intractable except for special cases, previous work has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-14 Kenji Kawaguchi , Mauricio Araya

We consider a Bayesian approach to offline model-based inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). The proposed framework differs from existing offline model-based IRL approaches by performing simultaneous estimation of the expert's reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Ran Wei , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Anthony McDonald , Mingyi Hong