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In partially observable reinforcement learning, offline training gives access to latent information which is not available during online training and/or execution, such as the system state. Asymmetric actor-critic methods exploit such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Andrea Baisero , Christopher Amato

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and conversational abilities, but ensuring reliable behavior in multi-turn interactions remains challenging. In many real-world applications, agents must succeed in one-shot settings…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Shuli Jiang , Zhaoyang Zhang , Yi Zhang , Shuo Yang , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Many modern approaches to offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) utilize behavior regularization, typically augmenting a model-free actor critic algorithm with a penalty measuring divergence of the policy from the offline data. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Jonathan Tompson , Rob Fergus , Ofir Nachum

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

The goal of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to find an optimal policy given prerecorded trajectories. Many current approaches customize existing off-policy RL algorithms, especially actor-critic algorithms in which policy evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Wonjoon Goo , Scott Niekum

Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Junfeng Wen , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Dale Schuurmans

In this work, we present a new model-free and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, that is capable of finding a near-optimal policy with state-action observations from arbitrary behavior policies. Our algorithm, called the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-21 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee , Niao He

This work extends an established critic match loss landscape visualization method from online to off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to reveal the optimization geometry behind critic learning. Off-policy RL differs from stepwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jingyi Liu , Jian Guo , Eberhard Gill

We propose Q-learning with Adjoint Matching (QAM), a novel TD-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that tackles a long-standing challenge in continuous-action RL: efficient optimization of an expressive diffusion or flow-matching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Melrose Roderick , Gaurav Manek , Felix Berkenkamp , J. Zico Kolter

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

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Approximation of the value functions in value-based deep reinforcement learning induces overestimation bias, resulting in suboptimal policies. We show that when the reinforcement signals received by the agents have a high variance, deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Baturay Saglam , Furkan Burak Mutlu , Dogan Can Cicek , Suleyman Serdar Kozat

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and its integration with deep learning have achieved impressive performance in various robotic control tasks, ranging from motion planning and navigation to end-to-end visual manipulation. However, stability is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Minghao Han , Lixian Zhang , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

For continuous action spaces, actor-critic methods are widely used in online reinforcement learning (RL). However, unlike RL algorithms for discrete actions, which generally model the optimal value function using the Bellman optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Motoki Omura , Kazuki Ota , Takayuki Osa , Yusuke Mukuta , Tatsuya Harada

We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient…

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved impressive results in a wide range of complex tasks, but poor sample efficiency remains a major obstacle to real-world deployment. Soft actor-critic (SAC) mitigates this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Luca Della Libera

In the field of reinforcement learning, because of the high cost and risk of policy training in the real world, policies are trained in a simulation environment and transferred to the corresponding real-world environment. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Takumi Tanabe , Rei Sato , Kazuto Fukuchi , Jun Sakuma , Youhei Akimoto

Continuous-time stochastic control with time-inhomogeneous jump-diffusion dynamics is central in finance and economics, but computing optimal policies is difficult under explicit time dependence, discontinuous shocks, and high…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Liya Guo , Ruimeng Hu , Xu Yang , Yi Zhu