English
Related papers

Related papers: Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning with Loss Functi…

200 papers

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

This paper illustrates the central role of loss functions in data-driven decision making, providing a comprehensive survey on their influence in cost-sensitive classification (CSC) and reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate how…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-07 Kaiwen Wang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Foundation models compress a large amount of information in a single, large neural network, which can then be queried for individual tasks. There are strong parallels between this widespread framework and offline goal-conditioned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Marco Bagatella , Mert Albaba , Jonas Hübotter , Georg Martius , Andreas Krause

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected data. However, it faces challenges of distributional shift, where the learned policy may encounter unseen scenarios not covered in the offline data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jin Zhu , Xin Zhou , Jiaang Yao , Gholamali Aminian , Omar Rivasplata , Simon Little , Lexin Li , Chengchun Shi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Exploration of the high-dimensional state action space is one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in multi-agent domain. We present a novel technique called Experience Augmentation, which enables a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Zhenhui Ye , Yining Chen , Guanghua Song , Bowei Yang , Shen Fan

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

Online matching problems arise in many complex systems, from cloud services and online marketplaces to organ exchange networks, where timely, principled decisions are critical for maintaining high system performance. Traditional heuristics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-09 Chiara Mignacco , Matthieu Jonckheere , Gilles Stoltz

Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Ilya Kostrikov , Ashvin Nair , Sergey Levine

Recent advances of gradient temporal-difference methods allow to learn off-policy multiple value functions in parallel with- out sacrificing convergence guarantees or computational efficiency. This opens up new possibilities for sound…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-22 Anna Harutyunyan , Tim Brys , Peter Vrancx , Ann Nowe

The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Learning in a lifelong setting, where the dynamics continually evolve, is a hard challenge for current reinforcement learning algorithms. Yet this would be a much needed feature for practical applications. In this paper, we propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Pierre Liotet , Francesco Vidaich , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Eshwar S R , Shishir Kolathaya , Gugan Thoppe

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) learns optimal policies from fixed datasets, training a policy once and deploying it at inference time without further refinement. Inspired by model predictive control (MPC), we introduce an inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Rohan Deb , Stephen J. Wright , Arindam Banerjee

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning holds the promise of enabling autonomous robots to learn large repertoires of behavioral skills with minimal human intervention. However, robotic applications of reinforcement learning often compromise the autonomy of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-11-24 Shixiang Gu , Ethan Holly , Timothy Lillicrap , Sergey Levine

This paper aims to solve a safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with risk measure-based constraints. As risk measures, such as conditional value at risk (CVaR), focus on the tail distribution of cost signals, constraining risk measures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Dohyeong Kim , Songhwai Oh

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms still suffer from high sample complexity despite outstanding recent successes. The need for intensive interactions with the environment is especially observed in many widely popular policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Samuele Tosatto , Joao Carvalho , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

Experience replay serves as a key component in the success of online reinforcement learning (RL). Prioritized experience replay (PER) reweights experiences by the temporal difference (TD) error empirically enhancing the performance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Changling Li , Zhang-Wei Hong , Pulkit Agrawal , Divyansh Garg , Joni Pajarinen