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Related papers: Fractal Landscapes in Policy Optimization

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Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising outer-loop intelligence paradigm which can deploy problem solving strategies for complex tasks. Consequently, DRL has been utilized for several scientific applications, specifically in cases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-05 Sahil Bhola , Suraj Pawar , Prasanna Balaprakash , Romit Maulik

We study computationally and statistically efficient reinforcement learning under the linear $Q^{\pi}$ realizability assumption, where any policy's $Q$-function is linear in a given state-action feature representation. Prior methods in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yijing Ke , Zihan Zhang , Ruosong Wang

In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Matthias Lehmann

Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jialian Li , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Jyun-Li Lin , Wei Hung , Shang-Hsuan Yang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu

Real-time path planning in constrained environments remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous systems. Traditional classical planners, while effective under perfect perception assumptions, are often sensitive to real-world perception…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Feng Tao , Luca Paparusso , Chenyi Gu , Robin Koehler , Chenxu Wu , Xinyu Huang , Christian Juette , David Paz , Ren Liu

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Standard model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms sample a new initial state for each trial, allowing them to optimize policies that can perform well even in highly stochastic environments. However, problems that exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-30 Dibya Ghosh , Avi Singh , Aravind Rajeswaran , Vikash Kumar , Sergey Levine

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) works impressively in some environments and fails catastrophically in others. Ideally, RL theory should be able to provide an understanding of why this is, i.e. bounds predictive of practical performance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Cassidy Laidlaw , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

Traditional continuous deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ deterministic or unimodal Gaussian actors, which cannot express complex multimodal decision distributions. This limitation can hinder their performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ziqi Wang , Jiashun Liu , Ling Pan

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of distributional mismatch between training and deployment, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning (RL) in discrete action space is ubiquitous in real-world applications, but its complexity grows exponentially with the action-space dimension, making it challenging to apply existing on-policy gradient based deep RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-24 Yuguang Yue , Yunhao Tang , Mingzhang Yin , Mingyuan Zhou

Among the reasons hindering reinforcement learning (RL) applications to real-world problems, two factors are critical: limited data and the mismatch between the testing environment (real environment in which the policy is deployed) and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Xiaoteng Ma , Zhipeng Liang , Jose Blanchet , Mingwen Liu , Li Xia , Jiheng Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sagalpreet Singh , Rishi Saket , Aravindan Raghuveer