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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) extends the paradigm of classical RL algorithms to purely learning from static datasets, without interacting with the underlying environment during the learning process. A key challenge of offline RL is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Shentao Yang , Yihao Feng , Shujian Zhang , Mingyuan Zhou

TD($\lambda$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yue Deng , Zirui Wang , Yin Zhang

In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a value-network that predicts the full distribution of the returns for a given state, often modeled via a quantile-based critic. This approach has been successfully integrated into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Michael Teng , Michiel van de Panne , Frank Wood

Leveraging the model's internal information as the self-reward signal in Reinforcement Learning (RL) has received extensive attention due to its label-free nature. While prior works have made significant progress in applying the Test-Time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Xizhong Yang , Yinan Xia , Huiming Wang , Mofei Song

Temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it combines ideas from dynamic programming and Monte Carlo methods in a way that allows for online and incremental model-free learning. A key idea of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 Kristopher De Asis , Brendan Bennett , Richard S. Sutton

Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shuyu Yin , Tao Luo , Peilin Liu , Zhi-Qin John Xu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

Sequential decision problems are widely studied across many areas of science. A key challenge when learning policies from historical data - a practice commonly referred to as off-policy learning - is how to ``identify'' the impact of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Joakim Blach Andersen , Qingyuan Zhao

Given the inherent non-stationarity prevalent in real-world applications, continual Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to equip the agent with the capability to address a series of sequentially presented decision-making tasks. Within this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Feng Chen , Fuguang Han , Cong Guan , Lei Yuan , Zhilong Zhang , Yang Yu , Zongzhang Zhang

Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Adithya M. Devraj , Sean P. Meyn

Gradient temporal difference (Gradient TD) algorithms are a popular class of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms used for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider Gradient TD algorithms with an additional heavy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Rohan Deb , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Eric Graves , Sina Ghiassian

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been increasingly employed to handle the dynamic and complex resource management in network slicing. The deployment of DRL policies in real networks, however, is complicated by heterogeneous cell…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Tianlun Hu , Qi Liao , Qiang Liu , Georg Carle

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Huizhen Yu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Richard S. Sutton

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made significant achievements in many real-world applications. But these real-world applications typically can only provide partial observations for making decisions due to occlusions and noisy sensors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yinbo Yu , Jiajia Liu , Shouqing Li , Kepu Huang , Xudong Feng

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari