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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

Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Tetsuro Morimura , Kazuhiro Ota , Kenshi Abe , Peinan Zhang

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Mohsen Amiri , Sindri Magnússon

Non-stationary domains, where unforeseen changes happen, present a challenge for agents to find an optimal policy for a sequential decision making problem. This work investigates a solution to this problem that combines Markov Decision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-04 Leonardo A. Ferreira , Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi , Paulo E. Santos , Ramon Lopez de Mantaras

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yaakov Engel , Michal Valko

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

Policy gradient methods have become popular in multi-agent reinforcement learning, but they suffer from high variance due to the presence of environmental stochasticity and exploring agents (i.e., non-stationarity), which is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Yuchen Xiao , Xueguang Lyu , Christopher Amato

This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Jinchi Chen , Jie Feng , Weiguo Gao , Ke Wei

We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Zhanhong Jiang , Xian Yeow Lee , Sin Yong Tan , Kai Liang Tan , Aditya Balu , Young M. Lee , Chinmay Hegde , Soumik Sarkar

Gradient-regularized value learning methods improve sample efficiency by leveraging learned models of transition dynamics and rewards to estimate return gradients. However, existing approaches, such as MAGE, struggle in stochastic or noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Baptiste Debes , Tinne Tuytelaars

The classical policy gradient method is the theoretical and conceptual foundation of modern policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most rigorous analyses of such methods, particularly those establishing convergence guarantees,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

We study reinforcement learning by combining recent advances in regularized linear programming formulations with the classical theory of stochastic approximation. Motivated by the challenge of designing algorithms that leverage off-policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-15 Axel Friedrich Wolter , Tobias Sutter

A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Pavel Osinenko , Dmitrii Dobriborsci , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown a promising performance in learning optimal policies for a variety of sequential decision-making tasks. However, in many real-world RL problems, besides optimizing the main objectives, the agent is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Ashkan B. Jeddi , Nariman L. Dehghani , Abdollah Shafieezadeh

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ziheng Cheng , Xin Guo , Yufei Zhang

The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Blossom Metevier , Philip S. Thomas

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Nicole Bäuerle , Athanasios Vasileiadis

In many robotic applications, some aspects of the system dynamics can be modeled accurately while others are difficult to obtain or model. We present a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for continuous state and action spaces that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Tomoki Nishi , Prashant Doshi , Michael R. James , Danil Prokhorov