Related papers: On the Estimation Bias in Double Q-Learning
The classic DQN algorithm is limited by the overestimation bias of the learned Q-function. Subsequent algorithms have proposed techniques to reduce this problem, without fully eliminating it. Recently, the Maxmin and Ensemble Q-learning…
Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…
Q-learning is a widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL), but its convergence can be slow, especially when the discount factor is close to one. Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) Q-learning, which introduces a relaxation factor to…
It is well known that the extension of Watkins' algorithm to general function approximation settings is challenging: does the projected Bellman equation have a solution? If so, is the solution useful in the sense of generating a good…
Q-Learning is a fundamental off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has the objective of approximating action-value functions in order to learn optimal policies. Nonetheless, it has difficulties in reconciling bias with…
``Distribution shift'' is the main obstacle to the success of offline reinforcement learning. A learning policy may take actions beyond the behavior policy's knowledge, referred to as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) actions. The Q-values for…
Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms have shown strong results in games, robotics, and other real-world applications. Overestimation bias is a known threat to those algorithms and can sometimes lead to dramatic performance…
Deep Q-Networks algorithm (DQN) was the first reinforcement learning algorithm using deep neural network to successfully surpass human level performance in a number of Atari learning environments. However, divergent and unstable behaviour…
Accurately detecting multiple change-points is critical for various applications, but determining the optimal number of change-points remains a challenge. Existing approaches based on information criteria attempt to balance goodness-of-fit…
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…
Bias is a common problem inherent in recommender systems, which is entangled with users' preferences and poses a great challenge to unbiased learning. For debiasing tasks, the doubly robust (DR) method and its variants show superior…
Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) achieves high-quality imitation by mitigating compounding errors in behavioral cloning (BC), but often exhibits training instability due to adversarial optimization. To avoid this issue, a class of…
We study both the value function and Q-function formulation of the Linear Programming approach to Approximate Dynamic Programming. The approach is model-based and optimizes over a restricted function space to approximate the value function…
Optimal trade execution is an important problem faced by essentially all traders. Much research into optimal execution uses stringent model assumptions and applies continuous time stochastic control to solve them. Here, we instead take a…
Contemporary machine learning methods will try to approach the Bayes error, as it is the lowest possible error any model can achieve. This paper postulates that any decision is composed of not one but two Bayesian decisions and that…
The use of target networks is a common practice in deep reinforcement learning for stabilizing the training; however, theoretical understanding of this technique is still limited. In this paper, we study the so-called periodic Q-learning…
The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…
The target network update frequency (TUF) is a central stabilization mechanism in (deep) Q-learning. However, their selection remains poorly understood and is often treated merely as another tunable hyperparameter rather than as a…
Q-learning is a regression-based approach that is widely used to formalize the development of an optimal dynamic treatment strategy. Finite dimensional working models are typically used to estimate certain nuisance parameters, and…
This paper develops an online inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at efficiently recovering a reward function from ongoing observations of an agent's actions. To reduce the computation time and storage space in reward estimation,…