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The objective in a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) problem is to find a policy that optimizes the expected value of a performance metric such as the infinite-horizon cumulative discounted or long-run average cost/reward. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Prashanth L. A. , Michael Fu

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are typically characterized as algorithms that perform policy updates using i.i.d. trajectories collected by the agent's current policy. However, after observing only a finite number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Nicholas E. Corrado , Josiah P. Hanna

Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Yu Bai

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…

One less addressed issue of deep reinforcement learning is the lack of generalization capability based on new state and new target, for complex tasks, it is necessary to give the correct strategy and evaluate all possible actions for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Mincong Luo , Yin Tong , Jiachi Liu

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

The policy gradient theorem gives a convenient form of the policy gradient in terms of three factors: an action value, a gradient of the action likelihood, and a state distribution involving discounting called the \emph{discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Fengdi Che , Gautham Vasan , A. Rupam Mahmood

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-01 Robert Denkert , Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin

Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-10 Shicong Cen , Yuejie Chi

In this paper we discuss policy iteration methods for approximate solution of a finite-state discounted Markov decision problem, with a focus on feature-based aggregation methods and their connection with deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-23 Dimitri P. Bertsekas

Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Guy Lorberbom , Chris J. Maddison , Nicolas Heess , Tamir Hazan , Daniel Tarlow

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been extensively employed in a wide range of decision-making problems, such as games and robotics. Recently, diffusion policies have shown strong potential in modeling multi-modal behaviors, enabling more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ben Liu , Shunpeng Yang , Hua Chen

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous action spaces is often approached by directly training parametric policies along the direction of estimated policy gradients (PGs). Previous research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Gang Chen

We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…

Speech recognition systems have achieved high recognition performance for several tasks. However, the performance of such systems is dependent on the tremendously costly development work of preparing vast amounts of task-matched transcribed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-13 Taku Kato , Takahiro Shinozaki

This paper addresses the issue of policy evaluation in Markov Decision Processes, using linear function approximation. It provides a unified view of algorithms such as TD(lambda), LSTD(lambda), iLSTD, residual-gradient TD. It is asserted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Manuel Loth , Philippe Preux

We study the use of policy gradient algorithms to optimize over a class of generalized Thompson sampling policies. Our central insight is to view the posterior parameter sampled by Thompson sampling as a kind of pseudo-action. Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Seungki Min , Ciamac C. Moallemi , Daniel J. Russo

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Xin Chen , Yifan Hu , Minda Zhao