Related papers: Adapting Double Q-Learning for Continuous Reinforc…
The challenge in the widely applicable online matching problem lies in making irrevocable assignments while there is uncertainty about future inputs. Most theoretically-grounded policies are myopic or greedy in nature. In real-world…
In value-based deep reinforcement learning methods, approximation of value functions induces overestimation bias and leads to suboptimal policies. We show that in deep actor-critic methods that aim to overcome the overestimation bias, if…
$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Despite its widespread success in various applications, it is prone to overestimation bias in the $Q$-learning update. To address this issue, double…
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…
Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…
A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Q-learning, perform poorly in the early stages of learning in noisy environments, because much effort is spent unlearning biased estimates of the state-action value function. The bias…
Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…
A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…
Q-learning suffers from overestimation bias, because it approximates the maximum action value using the maximum estimated action value. Algorithms have been proposed to reduce overestimation bias, but we lack an understanding of how bias…
Q-learning (QL), a common reinforcement learning algorithm, suffers from over-estimation bias due to the maximization term in the optimal Bellman operator. This bias may lead to sub-optimal behavior. Double-Q-learning tackles this issue by…
Infinite horizon off-policy policy evaluation is a highly challenging task due to the excessively large variance of typical importance sampling (IS) estimators. Recently, Liu et al. (2018a) proposed an approach that significantly reduces…
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…
Q-learning is a stochastic approximation version of the classic value iteration. The literature has established that Q-learning suffers from both maximization bias and slower convergence. Recently, multi-step algorithms have shown practical…
Importance sampling (IS) is a popular technique in off-policy evaluation, which re-weights the return of trajectories in the replay buffer to boost sample efficiency. However, training with IS can be unstable and previous attempts to…
The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…
Many real world tasks require multiple agents to work together. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed in recent years to solve these tasks, but current methods often fail to efficiently learn policies. We thus…
Compositional reinforcement learning is a promising approach for training policies to perform complex long-horizon tasks. Typically, a high-level task is decomposed into a sequence of subtasks and a separate policy is trained to perform…
Monotonic policy improvement and off-policy learning are two main desirable properties for reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, by lower bounding the performance difference of two policies, we show that the monotonic policy…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…