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Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Firas Al-Hafez , Guoping Zhao , Jan Peters , Davide Tateo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

We propose networked policy gradient play for solving Markov potential games with continuous and/or discrete state-action pairs. During the game, agents use parametrized and differentiable policies that depend on the current state and the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-02 Sarper Aydin , Ceyhun Eksin

Natural policy gradient methods are popular reinforcement learning methods that improve the stability of policy gradient methods by utilizing second-order approximations to precondition the gradient with the inverse of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Brennan Gebotys , Alexander Wong , David A. Clausi

Gradient boosting is a state-of-the-art prediction technique that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of simple predictors---typically decision trees---by solving an infinite-dimensional convex optimization…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-07-18 Gérard Biau , Benoît Cadre

In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-04 Mao Hong , Zhengling Qi , Yanxun Xu

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Traditional reinforcement learning agents learn from experience, past or present, gained through interaction with their environment. Our approach synthesizes experience, without requiring an agent to interact with their environment, by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-01 Chris R. Serrano , Michael A. Warren

Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Andrew Jacobsen , Alan Chan

We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenshuo Zhang , Minxuan Duan , Youran Ye , Hongyang R. Zhang

We focus on parameterized policy search for reinforcement learning over continuous action spaces. Typically, one assumes the score function associated with a policy is bounded, which fails to hold even for Gaussian policies. To properly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Amrit Singh Bedi , Souradip Chakraborty , Anjaly Parayil , Brian Sadler , Pratap Tokekar , Alec Koppel

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning algorithms to search for better policies in the parameterized policy space. They do gradient search in the policy space and are known to converge very slowly. Nesterov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-26 K. Lakshmanan

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Navdeep Kumar , Kaixin Wang , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

The policy gradients of the expected return objective can react slowly to rare rewards. Yet, in some cases agents may wish to emphasize the low or high returns regardless of their probability. Borrowing from the economics and control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-20 Chris J. Maddison , Dieterich Lawson , George Tucker , Nicolas Heess , Arnaud Doucet , Andriy Mnih , Yee Whye Teh

Classical policy gradient (PG) methods in reinforcement learning frequently converge to suboptimal local optima, a challenge exacerbated in large or complex environments. This work investigates Policy Gradient with Tree Search (PGTS), an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Uri Koren , Navdeep Kumar , Uri Gadot , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo

Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Bin Hu , Kaiqing Zhang , Na Li , Mehran Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Tamer Başar

We propose risk-sensitive reinforcement learning algorithms catering to three families of risk measures, namely expectiles, utility-based shortfall risk and optimized certainty equivalent risk. For each risk measure, in the context of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Sumedh Gupte , Shrey Rakeshkumar Patel , Soumen Pachal , Prashanth L. A. , Sanjay P. Bhat

Reinforcement learning is a growing field in AI with a lot of potential. Intelligent behavior is learned automatically through trial and error in interaction with the environment. However, this learning process is often costly. Using…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-12-08 Nico Meyer , Daniel D. Scherer , Axel Plinge , Christopher Mutschler , Michael J. Hartmann