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Related papers: Direct Advantage Estimation

200 papers

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yufei Wang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

The use of past experiences to accelerate temporal difference (TD) learning of value functions, or experience replay, is a key component in deep reinforcement learning. Prioritization or reweighting of important experiences has shown to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Samarth Sinha , Jiaming Song , Animesh Garg , Stefano Ermon

Reinforcement Learning has become a standard paradigm for aligning Large Language Models with human intent and task requirements. While Group Relative Policy Optimization offers an efficient, value-model-free alternative to Proximal Policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Guochao Jiang , Jingyi Song , Guofeng Quan , Chuzhan Hao , Guohua Liu , Yuewei Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary environments is challenging, as changing dynamics and rewards quickly make past experiences outdated. Traditional experience replay (ER) methods, especially those using TD-error prioritization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Tianyang Duan , Zongyuan Zhang , Songxiao Guo , Yuanye Zhao , Zheng Lin , Zihan Fang , Yi Liu , Dianxin Luan , Dong Huang , Heming Cui , Yong Cui

Active inference may be defined as Bayesian modeling of a brain with a biologically plausible model of the agent. Its primary idea relies on the free energy principle and the prior preference of the agent. An agent will choose an action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Jin young Shin , Cheolhyeong Kim , Hyung Ju Hwang

Machine learning methods often assume that input features are available at no cost. However, in domains like healthcare, where acquiring features could be expensive or harmful, it is necessary to balance a feature's acquisition cost against…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-18 Henrik von Kleist , Alireza Zamanian , Ilya Shpitser , Narges Ahmidi

Discovering causal relationships requires controlled experiments, but experimentalists face a sequential decision problem: each intervention reveals information that should inform what to try next. Traditional approaches such as random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Patrick Cooper , Alvaro Velasquez

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Accumulated Local Effect (ALE) is a method for accurately estimating feature effects, overcoming fundamental failure modes of previously-existed methods, such as Partial Dependence Plots. However, ALE's approximation, i.e. the method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Vasilis Gkolemis , Theodore Dalamagas , Christos Diou

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

Online AI Feedback (OAIF) presents a promising alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) by utilizing online AI preference in aligning language models (LLMs). However, the straightforward replacement of humans with AI…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Li He , He Zhao , Stephen Wan , Dadong Wang , Lina Yao , Tongliang Liu

Recent advances have demonstrated that integrating reinforcement learning with rule-based rewards can significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models, even without supervised fine-tuning. However, prevalent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Wei Sun , Wen Yang , Pu Jian , Qianlong Du , Fuwei Cui , Shuo Ren , Jiajun Zhang

This paper investigates the use of prior computation to estimate the value function to improve sample efficiency in on-policy policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning. Our approach is to estimate the value function from prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

In reinforcement learning, the advantage function is critical for policy improvement, but is often extracted from a learned Q-function. A natural question is: Why not learn the advantage function directly? In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Yunhao Tang , Rémi Munos , Mark Rowland , Michal Valko

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Sungee Hong , Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Jiacai Liu , Chaojie Wang , Chris Yuhao Liu , Liang Zeng , Rui Yan , Yiwen Sun , Yang Liu , Yahui Zhou

In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuqian Jiang , Sudarshanan Bharadwaj , Bo Wu , Rishi Shah , Ufuk Topcu , Peter Stone

In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-30 Will Dabney , Mark Rowland , Marc G. Bellemare , Rémi Munos