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Various methods for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have been developed with the assumption that agents' policies are based on accurate state information. However, policies learned through Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Songyang Han , Sanbao Su , Sihong He , Shuo Han , Haizhao Yang , Shaofeng Zou , Fei Miao

Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Tianbing Xu , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Michael Lu , Matin Aghaei , Anant Raj , Sharan Vaswani

Reactive (memoryless) policies are sufficient in completely observable Markov decision processes (MDPs), but some kind of memory is usually necessary for optimal control of a partially observable MDP. Policies with finite memory can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Nicolas Meuleau , Leonid Peshkin , Kee-Eung Kim , Leslie Pack Kaelbling

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to the curse of dimensionality induced by the non-stationarity of optimal policies. In this work,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

Scaling cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is fundamentally limited by cross-agent noise. When agents share a common reward, each agent's learning signal is computed from a shared return that depends on all agents, so the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Shan Yang , Yang Liu

The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Long Yang , Qian Zheng , Gang Pan

In many real-world scenarios, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are trained on data with dynamics shift, i.e., with different underlying environment dynamics. A majority of current methods address such issue by training context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Zhenghai Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Shuchang Liu , Dong Zheng , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

We consider a multi-agent Markov strategic interaction over an infinite horizon where agents can be of multiple types. We model the strategic interaction as a mean-field game in the asymptotic limit when the number of agents of each type…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Arnob Ghosh , Vaneet Aggarwal

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sara Klein , Simon Weissmann , Leif Döring

This paper introduces PG-Rainbow, a novel algorithm that incorporates a distributional reinforcement learning framework with a policy gradient algorithm. Existing policy gradient methods are sample inefficient and rely on the mean of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-22 WooJae Jeon , KangJun Lee , Jeewoo Lee

Large-scale search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically employ a two-stage architecture: an early-stage ranker (ESR) generates a candidate set, which is subsequently re-ranked by a late-stage ranker…

We introduce a learning method called ``gradient-based reinforcement planning'' (GREP). Unlike traditional DP methods that improve their policy backwards in time, GREP is a gradient-based method that plans ahead and improves its policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ivo Kwee , Marcus Hutter , Juergen Schmidhuber

The softmax policy gradient (PG) method, which performs gradient ascent under softmax policy parameterization, is arguably one of the de facto implementations of policy optimization in modern reinforcement learning. For $\gamma$-discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

Activities in reinforcement learning (RL) revolve around learning the Markov decision process (MDP) model, in particular, the following parameters: state values, V; state-action values, Q; and policy, pi. These parameters are commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Somnuk Phon-Amnuaisuk

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Junyu Zhang , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

In this paper, we consider jointly optimizing cell load balance and network throughput via a reinforcement learning (RL) approach, where inter-cell handover (i.e., user association assignment) and massive MIMO antenna tilting are configured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Zhou Zhou , Yan Xin , Hao Chen , Charlie Zhang , Lingjia Liu

This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Brandon Trabucco , Albert Qu , Simon Li , Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan

We investigate reinforcement learning in the setting of Markov decision processes for a large number of exchangeable agents interacting in a mean field manner. Applications include, for example, the control of a large number of robots…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-30 René Carmona , Mathieu Laurière , Zongjun Tan

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences typically relies on external supervision, which faces critical limitations: human annotations are scarce and subjective, reward models are vulnerable to reward hacking, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Yixuan Tang , Yi Yang