Related papers: Distillation Policy Optimization
We pursue a life-long learning approach to artificial intelligence that makes extensive use of reinforcement learning algorithms. We build on our prior work with general value functions (GVFs) and the Horde architecture. GVFs have been…
Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…
We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…
We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…
Off-policy learning algorithms have been known to be sensitive to the choice of hyper-parameters. However, unlike near on-policy algorithms for which hyper-parameters could be optimized via e.g. meta-gradients, similar techniques could not…
Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but counteracting off-policy bias without exacerbating variance is challenging. Classically, off-policy bias is corrected in a per-decision…
This paper addresses the problem of policy selection in domains with abundant logged data, but with a restricted interaction budget. Solving this problem would enable safe evaluation and deployment of offline reinforcement learning policies…
Offline reinforcement learning agents seek optimal policies from fixed data sets. With environmental interaction prohibited, agents face significant challenges in preventing errors in value estimates from compounding and subsequently…
We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…
Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…
This work develops a fully decentralized multi-agent algorithm for policy evaluation. The proposed scheme can be applied to two distinct scenarios. In the first scenario, a collection of agents have distinct datasets gathered following…
Offline policy learning aims to discover decision-making policies from previously-collected datasets without additional online interactions with the environment. As the training dataset is fixed, its quality becomes a crucial determining…
We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…
Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…
Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…
Offline reinforcement learning often requires a quality dataset that we can train a policy on. However, in many situations, it is not possible to get such a dataset, nor is it easy to train a policy to perform well in the actual environment…
To estimate the value functions of policies from exploratory data, most model-free off-policy algorithms rely on importance sampling, where the use of importance sampling ratios often leads to estimates with severe variance. It is thus…
Continuous and efficient experimentation is key to the practical success of user-facing applications on the web, both through online A/B-tests and off-policy evaluation. Despite their shared objective -- estimating the incremental value of…
Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…