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Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Bernhard Schölkopf , Sergey Levine

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn

Off-policy sampling and experience replay are key for improving sample efficiency and scaling model-free temporal difference learning methods. When combined with function approximation, such as neural networks, this combination is known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Ray Jiang , Shangtong Zhang , Veronica Chelu , Adam White , Hado van Hasselt

In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Xu-Hui Liu , Zhenghai Xue , Jing-Cheng Pang , Shengyi Jiang , Feng Xu , Yang Yu

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, particularly in the experience replay setting now commonly used with deep neural networks. Classically, off-policy estimation bias is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

Improving data utilization efficiency is critical for scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for long-horizon tasks where generating trajectories is expensive. However, the dominant RL methods for LLMs are largely on-policy: they update each…

Modern off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on simple uniform replay sampling and it remains unclear when and why non-uniform replay improves over this strong baseline. Across diverse RL settings, we show that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michal Korniak , Mikołaj Czarnecki , Yarden As , Piotr Miłoś , Pieter Abbeel , Michal Nauman

In this paper we provide a rigorous convergence analysis of a "off"-policy temporal difference learning algorithm with linear function approximation and per time-step linear computational complexity in "online" learning environment. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-20 Prasenjit Karmakar , Rajkumar Maity , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Arip Asadulaev , Maksim Bobrin , Salem Lahlou , Dmitry Dylov , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac

In this paper, we aim to develop a simple and scalable reinforcement learning algorithm that uses standard supervised learning methods as subroutines. Our goal is an algorithm that utilizes only simple and convergent maximum likelihood loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Xue Bin Peng , Aviral Kumar , Grace Zhang , Sergey Levine

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

Experience replay is central to off-policy algorithms in deep reinforcement learning (RL), but there remain significant gaps in our understanding. We therefore present a systematic and extensive analysis of experience replay in Q-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 William Fedus , Prajit Ramachandran , Rishabh Agarwal , Yoshua Bengio , Hugo Larochelle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney

Building upon the recent success of deep reinforcement learning methods, we investigate the possibility of on-policy reinforcement learning improvement by reusing the data from several consecutive policies. On-policy methods bring many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Dmitry Kangin , Nicolas Pugeault

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Riashat Islam , Komal K. Teru , Deepak Sharma , Joelle Pineau

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment. These are critical shortcomings for applying RL to real-world problems where…

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt