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Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Junyu Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Zheng Yu , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning optimal policies in environments where direct exploration is expensive or unfeasible. However, the adoption of such policies in practice is often challenging, as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Aaron Sonabend-W , Junwei Lu , Leo A. Celi , Tianxi Cai , Peter Szolovits

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Junyu Zhang , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-14 Yemi Okesanjo , Victor Kofia

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, offers the prospect of policy optimization from large pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction. It addresses challenges with regard to the cost of data…

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-06 John Schulman , Nicolas Heess , Theophane Weber , Pieter Abbeel

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of modern machine learning. Sometimes, there are many different potential gradient estimators that can be used. When so, choosing the one with the best tradeoff between cost and variance is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Tomas Geffner , Justin Domke

Diffusion policy sampling enables reinforcement learning (RL) to represent multimodal action distributions beyond suboptimal unimodal Gaussian policies. However, existing diffusion-based RL methods primarily focus on offline settings for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Wenxuan Yuan , Boyang Li , Yuanchao Xu , Yiming Yang , Hao Liang , Bei Peng , Robert Loftin , Zhuo Sun , Yukun Hu

Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Sattar Vakili , Sudeep Salgia , Qing Zhao

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Dongdong Li , Jiuxiang Dong

A major challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the difficulty of learning an optimal policy from sparse rewards. Prior works enhance online RL with conventional Imitation Learning (IL) via a handcrafted auxiliary objective, at the cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Shilong Deng , Zetao Zheng , Hongcai He , Paul Weng , Jie Shao

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

We study statistical inverse learning in the context of nonlinear inverse problems under random design. Specifically, we address a class of nonlinear problems by employing gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-24 Abhishake , Nicole Mücke , Tapio Helin

While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Qinghua Liu , Gellért Weisz , András György , Chi Jin , Csaba Szepesvári

The paradigm of decision-making has been revolutionised by reinforcement learning and deep learning. Although this has led to significant progress in domains such as robotics, healthcare, and finance, the use of RL in practice is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Daqian Shao

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We propose a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)-type algorithm for Personalized Federated Learning which can be particularly attractive for mobile energy-limited regimes due to its low per-client computational cost. The model to be trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Sotirios Nikoloutsopoulos , Iordanis Koutsopoulos , Michalis K. Titsias