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Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Pulkit Katdare , Anant Joshi , Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Constructing states from sequences of observations is an important component of reinforcement learning agents. One solution for state construction is to use recurrent neural networks. Back-propagation through time (BPTT), and real-time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Khurram Javed , Haseeb Shah , Rich Sutton , Martha White

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), state representations are key to dealing with large or continuous state spaces. While one of the promises of deep learning algorithms is to automatically construct features well-tuned for the task they try to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Charline Le Lan , Stephen Tu , Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Rishabh Agarwal , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

We present an algorithm for model-based reinforcement learning that combines Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) with random roll-outs and stochastic optimization for policy learning. The BNNs are trained by minimizing $\alpha$-divergences,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-09 Stefan Depeweg , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Finale Doshi-Velez , Steffen Udluft

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Matteo Papini , Giorgio Manganini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Ezio Bartocci , Luca Bortolussi , Tomǎš Brázdil , Dimitrios Milios , Guido Sanguinetti

Stochastic resetting, where a dynamical process is intermittently returned to a fixed reference state, has emerged as a powerful mechanism for optimizing first-passage properties. Existing theory largely treats static, non-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Jello Zhou , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

Reinforcement learning has been widely used in many problems, including quantum control of qubits. However, such problems can, at the same time, be solved by traditional, non-machine-learning methods, such as stochastic gradient descent and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-05-06 Xiao-Ming Zhang , Zezhu Wei , Raza Asad , Xu-Chen Yang , Xin Wang

Tabular reinforcement learning methods cannot operate directly on continuous state spaces. One solution for this problem is to partition the state space. A good partitioning enables generalization during learning and more efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Mohsen Ghaffari , Mahsa Varshosaz , Einar Broch Johnsen , Andrzej Wąsowski

Using the policy gradient algorithm, we train a single-hidden-layer neural network to balance a physically accurate simulation of a single inverted pendulum. The trained weights and biases can then be transferred to a physical agent, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Dylan Bates

We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Haoxuan Pan , Deheng Ye , Xiaoming Duan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Jianping He , Mingfei Sun

Sequence-to-sequence architectures built upon recurrent neural networks have become a standard choice for multi-step-ahead time series prediction. In these models, the decoder produces future values conditioned on contextual inputs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Qi Sima , Xinze Zhang , Yukun Bao , Siyue Yang , Liang Shen

Reinforcement learning is a powerful approach to learn behaviour through interactions with an environment. However, behaviours are usually learned in a purely reactive fashion, where an appropriate action is selected based on an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 André Biedenkapp , Raghu Rajan , Frank Hutter , Marius Lindauer

We propose Fractional Policy Gradients (FPG), a reinforcement learning framework incorporating fractional calculus for long-term temporal modeling in policy optimization. Standard policy gradient approaches face limitations from Markovian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Urvi Pawar , Kunal Telangi

Reinforcement learning means learning a policy--a mapping of observations into actions--based on feedback from the environment. The learning can be viewed as browsing a set of policies while evaluating them by trial through interaction with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Leonid Peshkin , Virginia Savova

Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 John Schulman , Philipp Moritz , Sergey Levine , Michael Jordan , Pieter Abbeel

TD($\lambda$) with function approximation has proved empirically successful for some complex reinforcement learning problems. For linear approximation, TD($\lambda$) has been shown to minimise the squared error between the approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Lex Weaver , Jonathan Baxter

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine