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Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning have become increasingly prevalent for state-of-the-art performance in continuous control tasks. Novel methods typically benchmark against a few key algorithms such as deep deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-15 Riashat Islam , Peter Henderson , Maziar Gomrokchi , Doina Precup

We study the estimation of policy gradients for continuous-time systems with known dynamics. By reframing policy learning in continuous-time, we show that it is possible construct a more efficient and accurate gradient estimator. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Samuel Ainsworth , Kendall Lowrey , John Thickstun , Zaid Harchaoui , Siddhartha Srinivasa

We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Hung Le , Thommen Karimpanal George , Majid Abdolshah , Dung Nguyen , Kien Do , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet current methods face key challenges in resource allocation and policy optimization dynamics: (i) uniform rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yangyi Fang , Jiaye Lin , Xiaoliang Fu , Cong Qin , Haolin Shi , Chaowen Hu , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

Composing previously mastered skills to solve novel tasks promises dramatic improvements in the data efficiency of reinforcement learning. Here, we analyze two recent works composing behaviors represented in the form of action-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-08 Jonathan J Hunt , Andre Barreto , Timothy P Lillicrap , Nicolas Heess

Reinforcement learning has been explored for many problems, from video games with deterministic environments to portfolio and operations management in which scenarios are stochastic; however, there have been few attempts to test these…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-02-19 Sherly Alfonso-Sánchez , Jesús Solano , Alejandro Correa-Bahnsen , Kristina P. Sendova , Cristián Bravo

There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Lex Weaver , Nigel Tao

An efficient policy search algorithm should estimate the local gradient of the objective function, with respect to the policy parameters, from as few trials as possible. Whereas most policy search methods estimate this gradient by observing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Gregory Lawrence , Stuart Russell

Supervised approaches for text summarisation suffer from the problem of mismatch between the target labels/scores of individual sentences and the evaluation score of the final summary. Reinforcement learning can solve this problem by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Diego Molla

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning algorithms to search for better policies in the parameterized policy space. They do gradient search in the policy space and are known to converge very slowly. Nesterov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-26 K. Lakshmanan

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Entropy augmented to reward is known to soften the greedy argmax policy to softmax policy. Entropy augmentation is reformulated and leads to a motivation to introduce an additional entropy term to the objective function in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Donghoon Lee

Despite the success achieved by the analysis of supervised learning algorithms in the framework of statistical mechanics, reinforcement learning has remained largely untouched. Here we move towards closing the gap by analyzing the dynamics…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-09-02 Riccardo Fabbricatore , Vladimir V. Palyulin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Samin Yeasar Arnob , Doina Precup

Reinforcement learning means learning a policy--a mapping of observations into actions--based on feedback from the environment. The learning can be viewed as browsing a set of policies while evaluating them by trial through interaction with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Leonid Peshkin , Virginia Savova

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri