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In Reinforcement Learning, the optimal action at a given state is dependent on policy decisions at subsequent states. As a consequence, the learning targets evolve with time and the policy optimization process must be efficient at…
Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…
We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…
In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…
Hybrid RL is the setting where an RL agent has access to both offline data and online data by interacting with the real-world environment. In this work, we propose a new hybrid RL algorithm that combines an on-policy actor-critic method…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of off-policy policy improvement algorithms with state-action density ratio correction under function approximation setting, where the objective function is formulated as a max-max-min…
Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…
We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…
This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…
Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…
In this paper, we establish the global optimality and convergence rate of an off-policy actor critic algorithm in the tabular setting without using density ratio to correct the discrepancy between the state distribution of the behavior…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…
Monotonic policy improvement and off-policy learning are two main desirable properties for reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, by lower bounding the performance difference of two policies, we show that the monotonic policy…