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In this paper, we study distributional reinforcement learning from the perspective of statistical efficiency. We investigate distributional policy evaluation, aiming to estimate the complete return distribution (denoted $\eta^\pi$) attained…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-13 Liangyu Zhang , Yang Peng , Jiadong Liang , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

In real-world scenarios, datasets collected from randomized experiments are often constrained by size, due to limitations in time and budget. As a result, leveraging large observational datasets becomes a more attractive option for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Danyang Wang , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Will Wei Sun

Several algorithms have been proposed to sample non-uniformly the replay buffer of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to speed-up learning, but very few theoretical foundations of these sampling schemes have been provided. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Thibault Lahire , Matthieu Geist , Emmanuel Rachelson

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success, yet its deployment in real-world scenarios is often limited by vulnerability to environmental uncertainties. Distributionally robust RL (DR-RL) algorithms have been proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mingxuan Cui , Duo Zhou , Yuxuan Han , Grani A. Hanasusanto , Qiong Wang , Huan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in robotic control; however, state-of-the-art policy learning methods, such as actor-critic methods, still suffer from high sample complexity and often produce physically…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Namai Chandra , Liu Mohan , Zhihao Gu , Lin Wang

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

Robotic manipulation remains challenging for reinforcement learning due to contact-rich dynamics, long horizons, and training instability. Although off-policy actor-critic algorithms such as SAC and TD3 perform well in simulation, they…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yu Zhang , Karl Mason

To improve the sample efficiency of policy-gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms, we propose implicit distributional actor-critic (IDAC) that consists of a distributional critic, built on two deep generator networks (DGNs), and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Yuguang Yue , Zhendong Wang , Mingyuan Zhou

Multi-agent navigation in dynamic environments is of great industrial value when deploying a large scale fleet of robot to real-world applications. This paper proposes a decentralized partially observable multi-agent path planning with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-08-03 Zuxin Liu , Baiming Chen , Hongyi Zhou , Guru Koushik , Martial Hebert , Ding Zhao

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in continuous control due to its robustness and stable training, yet it remains sample-inefficient in tasks with expensive interactions and high-dimensional action spaces. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Tianci Gao , Konstantin A. Neusypin , Dmitry D. Dmitriev , Bo Yang , Shengren Rao

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

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have significant potential for dialogue policy optimisation. However, they suffer from a poor performance in the early stages of learning. This is especially problematic for on-line learning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-06 Pei-Hao Su , Pawel Budzianowski , Stefan Ultes , Milica Gasic , Steve Young

We introduce Phasic Policy Gradient (PPG), a reinforcement learning framework which modifies traditional on-policy actor-critic methods by separating policy and value function training into distinct phases. In prior methods, one must choose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Karl Cobbe , Jacob Hilton , Oleg Klimov , John Schulman

Experience replay is widely used in deep reinforcement learning algorithms and allows agents to remember and learn from experiences from the past. In an effort to learn more efficiently, researchers proposed prioritized experience replay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-20 Marc Brittain , Josh Bertram , Xuxi Yang , Peng Wei

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

Optimal decision making with limited or no information in stochastic environments where multiple agents interact is a challenging topic in the realm of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for arriving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Roi Ceren

Effective reinforcement learning requires a proper balance of exploration and exploitation defined by the dispersion of action distribution. However, this balance depends on the task, the current stage of the learning process, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Paweł Wawrzyński , Wojciech Masarczyk , Mateusz Ostaszewski

We propose a distributed architecture for deep reinforcement learning at scale, that enables agents to learn effectively from orders of magnitude more data than previously possible. The algorithm decouples acting from learning: the actors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-05 Dan Horgan , John Quan , David Budden , Gabriel Barth-Maron , Matteo Hessel , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver

Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental methodology in autonomous driving systems, where generative policies exhibit considerable potential by leveraging their ability to model complex distributions to enhance exploration. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Tianze Zhu , Yinuo Wang , Wenjun Zou , Tianyi Zhang , Likun Wang , Letian Tao , Feihong Zhang , Yao Lyu , Shengbo Eben Li