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Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have high sample complexity while off-policy algorithms are difficult to tune. Merging the two holds the promise to develop efficient algorithms that generalize across diverse environments.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-17 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Luis E. Ortiz , Leslie Pack Kaelbling

In order to develop complex relationships between their inputs and outputs, deep neural networks train and adjust large number of parameters. To make these networks work at high accuracy, vast amounts of data are needed. Sometimes, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Joshua Shunk

In environments with delayed observation, state augmentation by including actions within the delay window is adopted to retrieve Markovian property to enable reinforcement learning (RL). However, state-of-the-art (SOTA) RL techniques with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Qingyuan Wu , Simon Sinong Zhan , Yixuan Wang , Yuhui Wang , Chung-Wei Lin , Chen Lv , Qi Zhu , Chao Huang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms often require a large amount of data and struggle in sparse-reward domains with long planning horizons and multiple sub-goals. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic extension of Proximal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Simone Murari , Celeste Veronese , Daniele Meli

Recent developments in offline reinforcement learning have uncovered the immense potential of diffusion modeling, which excels at representing heterogeneous behavior policies. However, sampling from diffusion policies is considerably slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Huayu Chen , Cheng Lu , Zhengyi Wang , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

We seek to understand what facilitates sample-efficient learning from historical datasets for sequential decision-making, a problem that is popularly known as offline reinforcement learning (RL). Further, we are interested in algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Raman Arora

Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-01 Anna Korba , François Portier

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Very recently proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms have been proposed as first-order optimization methods for effective reinforcement learning. While PPO is inspired by the same learning theory that justifies trust region policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-20 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng , Mengjie Zhang

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) seeks to enhance data efficiency by learning a model of the environment and generating synthetic rollouts from it. However, accumulated model errors during these rollouts can distort the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Bernd Frauenknecht , Devdutt Subhasish , Friedrich Solowjow , Sebastian Trimpe

"Clipping" (a.k.a. importance weight truncation) is a widely used variance-reduction technique for counterfactual off-policy estimators. Like other variance-reduction techniques, clipping reduces variance at the cost of increased bias.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Jan Malte Lichtenberg , Alexander Buchholz , Giuseppe Di Benedetto , Matteo Ruffini , Ben London

While a powerful and promising approach, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) still suffers from sample inefficiency, which can be notably improved by resorting to more sophisticated techniques to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Jianshu Hu , Paul Weng , Yutong Ban

We introduce Dynamic Dropout, a novel regularization technique designed to enhance the training efficiency of Transformer models by dynamically adjusting the dropout rate based on training epochs or validation loss improvements. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Hanrui Yan , Dan Shao

Limiting failures of machine learning systems is of paramount importance for safety-critical applications. In order to improve the robustness of machine learning systems, Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has been proposed as a…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one of the promising approaches for introducing robots into complicated environments. The recent remarkable progress of DRL stands on regularization of policy, which allows the policy to improve stably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning performance, with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a standard paradigm for post-training. A representative algorithm, group relative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yuheng Zhang , Wenlin Yao , Changlong Yu , Yao Liu , Qingyu Yin , Bing Yin , Hyokun Yun , Lihong Li

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

Despite remarkable successes, deep reinforcement learning algorithms remain sample inefficient: they require an enormous amount of trial and error to find good policies. Model-based algorithms promise sample efficiency by building an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Remo Sasso , Michelangelo Conserva , Paulo Rauber