Related papers: Explaining Off-Policy Actor-Critic From A Bias-Var…

We investigate the combination of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms with uniform large-scale experience replay and propose solutions for two challenges: (a) efficient actor-critic learning with experience replay (b) stability…

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…

The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this…

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…

Actor-critic algorithms that make use of distributional policy evaluation have frequently been shown to outperform their non-distributional counterparts on many challenging control tasks. Examples of this behavior include the D4PG and DMPO…

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these methods in…

Efficient utilization of the replay buffer plays a significant role in the off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms used for model-free control policy synthesis for complex dynamical systems. We propose a method for…

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas…

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

A central challenge to applying many off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problems is the variance introduced by importance sampling. In off-policy learning, the agent learns about a different policy than the one being…

Off-policy learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy ($\pi$) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause…

The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in tackling many complex real-world tasks, by leveraging previously collected data for policy learning. However, most existing off-policy RL algorithms fail to maximally…

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…