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We propose two policy gradient algorithms for solving the problem of control in an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) context. Both algorithms incorporate a smoothed functional (SF) based gradient estimation scheme. The first algorithm…

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere

An intelligent decision-making system enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications is essential to achieve safe and efficient autonomous driving (AD), where two types of decisions have to be made at different timescales, i.e.,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-21 Tong Liu , Lei Lei , Kan Zheng , Xuemin , Shen

Temporal-difference learning with gradient correction (TDC) is a two time-scale algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. This algorithm was initially proposed with linear function approximation, and was later extended to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yi Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) under changing environment models many real-world applications via nonstationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and hence gains considerable interest. However, theoretical studies on nonstationary MDPs in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Yuan Cheng , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Mikoto Kudo , Takumi Tanabe , Akifumi Wachi , Youhei Akimoto

Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-30 Mohammad Mehrabi , Stefan Wager

This paper develops a model-free volt-VAR optimization (VVO) algorithm via multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) in unbalanced distribution systems. This method is novel since we cast the VVO problem in unbalanced distribution…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-21 Ying Zhang , Xinan Wang , Jianhui Wang , Yingchen Zhang

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

We study the offline reinforcement learning (RL) in the face of unmeasured confounders. Due to the lack of online interaction with the environment, offline RL is facing the following two significant challenges: (i) the agent may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zuyue Fu , Zhengling Qi , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Yanxun Xu , Michael R. Kosorok

In reinforcement learning (RL), function approximation errors are known to easily lead to the Q-value overestimations, thus greatly reducing policy performance. This paper presents a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Jingliang Duan , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yangang Ren , Bo Cheng

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Gradient-based temporal difference (GTD) algorithms are widely used in off-policy learning scenarios. Among them, the two time-scale TD with gradient correction (TDC) algorithm has been shown to have superior performance. In contrast to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Tengyu Xu , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang

This study proposes the use of a social learning method to estimate a global state within a multi-agent off-policy actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) operating in a partially observable environment. We assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Ainur Zhaikhan , Ali H. Sayed

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

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

In this paper, we address the problem of setting the tap positions of load tap changers (LTCs) for voltage regulation in radial power distribution systems under uncertain load dynamics. The objective is to find a policy to determine the tap…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-09 Hanchen Xu , Alejandro D. Domínguez-García , Peter W. Sauer

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Melrose Roderick , Gaurav Manek , Felix Berkenkamp , J. Zico Kolter

We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Sumitra Ganesh , Alec Koppel