Related papers: Explaining Off-Policy Actor-Critic From A Bias-Var…
We develop an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for learning an optimal policy from a training set composed of data from multiple individuals. This algorithm is developed with a view towards its use in mobile health.
This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…
We introduce a class of variational actor-critic algorithms based on a variational formulation over both the value function and the policy. The objective function of the variational formulation consists of two parts: one for maximizing the…
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…
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…
Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…
While on-policy algorithms are known for their stability, they often demand a substantial number of samples. In contrast, off-policy algorithms, which leverage past experiences, are considered sample-efficient but tend to exhibit…
In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…
Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…
Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…
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 propose A-Crab (Actor-Critic Regularized by Average Bellman error), a new practical algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) in complex environments with insufficient data coverage. Our algorithm combines the marginalized…
In this paper, we provide finite-sample convergence guarantees for an off-policy variant of the natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithm based on Importance Sampling. In particular, we show that the algorithm converges to a global optimal…
A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…
In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…
Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…
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…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…