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Related papers: Bayesian Distributional Policy Gradients

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We present a unifying framework for designing and analysing distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms in terms of recursively estimating statistics of the return distribution. Our key insight is that DRL algorithms can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-22 Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , Saurabh Kumar , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

The distributional reinforcement learning (RL) approach advocates for representing the complete probability distribution of the random return instead of only modelling its expectation. A distributional RL algorithm may be characterised by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Thibaut Théate , Antoine Wehenkel , Adrien Bolland , Gilles Louppe , Damien Ernst

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

We propose an (offline) multi-dimensional distributional reinforcement learning framework (KE-DRL) that leverages Hilbert space mappings to estimate the kernel mean embedding of the multi-dimensional value distribution under a proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Mehrdad Mohammadi , Qi Zheng , Ruoqing Zhu

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly considering reinforcement learning to optimize decisions in complex domains like robotics and healthcare. To date, these efforts have largely utilized expectation-based learning. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zequn Chen , Wesley J. Marrero

Distributional reinforcement learning improves performance by capturing environmental stochasticity, but a comprehensive theoretical understanding of its effectiveness remains elusive. In addition, the intractable element of the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Seokhun Ju , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

In preference-based reinforcement learning (RL), an agent interacts with the environment while receiving preferences instead of absolute feedback. While there is increasing research activity in preference-based RL, the design of formal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Ellen R. Novoseller , Yibing Wei , Yanan Sui , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick

Can we use reinforcement learning to learn general-purpose policies that can perform a wide range of different tasks, resulting in flexible and reusable skills? Contextual policies provide this capability in principle, but the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Soroush Nasiriany , Vitchyr H. Pong , Ashvin Nair , Alexander Khazatsky , Glen Berseth , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of sequential decision-making problems. Recent diffusion-based policies further improve RL by modeling complex, high-dimensional action distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Xiaofeng Xiao , Xiao Hu , Yang Ye , Xubo Yue

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based motion planning has recently shown the potential to outperform traditional approaches from autonomous navigation to robot manipulation. In this work, we focus on a motion planning task for an evasive target…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Zixuan Wu , Sean Ye , Manisha Natarajan , Matthew C. Gombolay

Aligning generative diffusion models with human preferences via reinforcement learning (RL) is critical yet challenging. Most existing algorithms are often vulnerable to reward hacking, such as quality degradation, over-stylization, or…

Gradient-regularized value learning methods improve sample efficiency by leveraging learned models of transition dynamics and rewards to estimate return gradients. However, existing approaches, such as MAGE, struggle in stochastic or noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Baptiste Debes , Tinne Tuytelaars

Bayesian methods for machine learning have been widely investigated, yielding principled methods for incorporating prior information into inference algorithms. In this survey, we provide an in-depth review of the role of Bayesian methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-09-16 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor , Joelle Pineau , Aviv Tamar

We propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) formulation for training continuous-time score-based diffusion models for generative AI to generate samples that maximize reward functions while keeping the generated distributions close to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xuefeng Gao , Jiale Zha , Xun Yu Zhou

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in high dimensional episodic Markov decision processes (MDP). We consider value-based RL when the optimal Q-value is a linear function of d-dimensional state-action feature representation. For instance,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Animashree Anandkumar

Reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but learned policies often degrade in performance when test conditions differ from the training distribution. This limitation is especially important in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Shaifalee Saxena , Rafael Fierro , Alexander Scheinker

Since their introduction a year ago, distributional approaches to reinforcement learning (distributional RL) have produced strong results relative to the standard approach which models expected values (expected RL). However, aside from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Clare Lyle , Pablo Samuel Castro , Marc G. Bellemare

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can learn optimal policies from pre-collected offline datasets without interacting with the environment, but the sampled actions of the agent cannot often cover the action distribution under a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Xuemin Hu , Shen Li , Yingfen Xu , Bo Tang , Long Chen