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Several algorithms have been proposed to sample non-uniformly the replay buffer of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to speed-up learning, but very few theoretical foundations of these sampling schemes have been provided. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Thibault Lahire , Matthieu Geist , Emmanuel Rachelson

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

We aim to develop off-policy DRL algorithms that not only exceed state-of-the-art performance but are also simple and minimalistic. For standard continuous control benchmarks, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which employs entropy maximization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Che Wang , Yanqiu Wu , Quan Vuong , Keith Ross

While Experience Replay - the practice of storing rollouts and reusing them multiple times during training - is a foundational technique in general RL, it remains largely unexplored in LLM post-training due to the prevailing belief that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Charles Arnal , Vivien Cabannes , Taco Cohen , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: high sample…

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia , Jiaqi Yan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) often deals with suboptimal data when collecting large expert datasets is unavailable or impractical. This limitation makes it difficult for agents to generalize and achieve high performance, as they must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Daniil Zelezetsky , Egor Cherepanov , Alexey K. Kovalev , Aleksandr I. Panov

Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng , Keilung Choy

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by their need for an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Denis Steckelmacher , Hélène Plisnier , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

Experience replay \citep{lin1993reinforcement, mnih2015human} is a widely used technique to achieve efficient use of data and improved performance in RL algorithms. In experience replay, past transitions are stored in a memory buffer and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Liran Szlak , Ohad Shamir

Learning in high dimensional continuous tasks is challenging, mainly when the experience replay memory is very limited. We introduce a simple yet effective experience sharing mechanism for deterministic policies in continuous action domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-28 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

Modern off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on simple uniform replay sampling and it remains unclear when and why non-uniform replay improves over this strong baseline. Across diverse RL settings, we show that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michal Korniak , Mikołaj Czarnecki , Yarden As , Piotr Miłoś , Pieter Abbeel , Michal Nauman

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Samin Yeasar Arnob , Doina Precup

We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm, essentially based on entropy regularization. SAC trains a policy by maximizing the trade-off between expected return and entropy (randomness in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are incapable of learning solely from batch offline data without online interactions with the environment, due to the phenomenon known as \textit{extrapolation error}. This is often due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Riashat Islam , Komal K. Teru , Deepak Sharma , Joelle Pineau

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman , Mohsen Zamani