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Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin

Off-policy learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy ($\pi$) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause…

Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-18 Ali Baheri

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

In this work, we propose Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic (BAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm. BAC mathematically formulates the behavior of the policy through autoencoders by providing an accurate estimation of how frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Ammar Fayad , Majd Ibrahim

Actor-critic methods constitute a central paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), coupling policy evaluation with policy improvement. While effective across many domains, these methods rely on separate actor and critic networks, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an effective policy from a static dataset. To alleviate extrapolation errors, existing studies often uniformly regularize the value function or policy updates across all states. However, due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Qin-Wen Luo , Ming-Kun Xie , Ye-Wen Wang , Sheng-Jun Huang

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

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

In this work, we study the problem of finding robust and safe policies in Robust Constrained Average-Cost Markov Decision Processes (RCMDPs). A key challenge in this setting is the lack of strong duality, which prevents the direct use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anirudh Satheesh , Sooraj Sathish , Swetha Ganesh , Keenan Powell , Vaneet Aggarwal

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an agent from pre-collected datasets, avoiding unsafe and inefficient real-time interaction. However, inevitable access to out-ofdistribution actions during the learning process introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Fan Zhang , Baoru Huang , Xin Zhang

Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Prateek Jain , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-25 Esther Derman , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Shie Mannor

The dataset distributions in offline reinforcement learning (RL) often exhibit complex and multi-modal distributions, necessitating expressive policies to capture such distributions beyond widely-used Gaussian policies. To handle such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Jongseong Chae , Jongeui Park , Yongjae Shin , Gyeongmin Kim , Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos