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Empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of an agent's potential influence on its environment, has emerged as a powerful intrinsic motivation and exploration framework for reinforcement learning (RL). Besides for unsupervised RL and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Moritz Schneider , Robert Krug , Narunas Vaskevicius , Luigi Palmieri , Michael Volpp , Joschka Boedecker

Experience replay is crucial for off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) methods. By remembering and reusing the experiences from past different policies, experience replay significantly improves the training efficiency and stability of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Yongsheng Mei , Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Guru Venkataramani , Peng Wei

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MaxEnt-RL) has become the standard approach to RL due to its beneficial exploration properties. Traditionally, policies are parameterized using Gaussian distributions, which significantly limits their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Onur Celik , Zechu Li , Denis Blessing , Ge Li , Daniel Palenicek , Jan Peters , Georgia Chalvatzaki , Gerhard Neumann

This work focuses on the entropy-regularized independent natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this work, agents are assumed to have access to an oracle with exact policy evaluation and seek to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Youbang Sun , Tao Liu , P. R. Kumar , Shahin Shahrampour

Modern meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods are mainly developed based on model-agnostic meta-learning, which performs policy gradient steps across tasks to maximize policy performance. However, the gradient conflict problem is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Haozhi Wang , Qing Wang , Yunfeng Shao , Dong Li , Jianye Hao , Yinchuan Li

Large language model post-training relies on reinforcement learning to improve model capability and alignment quality. However, the off-policy training paradigm introduces distribution shift, which often pushes the policy beyond the trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Zhenpeng Su , Leiyu Pan , Minxuan Lv , Tiehua Mei , Zijia Lin , Yuntao Li , Wenping Hu , Ruiming Tang , Kun Gai , Guorui Zhou

Trust region methods rigorously enabled reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn monotonically improving policies, leading to superior performance on a variety of tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to multi-agent reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Jakub Grudzien Kuba , Ruiqing Chen , Muning Wen , Ying Wen , Fanglei Sun , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

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

This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Akhil Agnihotri

Transfer reinforcement learning (RL) aims at improving the learning efficiency of an agent by exploiting knowledge from other source agents trained on relevant tasks. However, it remains challenging to transfer knowledge between different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Mohammadamin Barekatain , Ryo Yonetani , Masashi Hamaya

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms have been demonstrated to perform well on high-dimensional decision making and robotic control tasks. However, because they solely optimize for rewards, the agent tends to search the same…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Kandai Watanabe , Mathew Strong , Omer Eldar

Offline reinforcement learning suffers from the out-of-distribution issue and extrapolation error. Most policy constraint methods regularize the density of the trained policy towards the behavior policy, which is too restrictive in most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Yixiu Mao , Hongchang Zhang , Chen Chen , Yi Xu , Xiangyang Ji

In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Trust region policy optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in Reinforcement Learning (RL) in which a surrogate problem, that restricts consecutive policies to be 'close' to one another, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-13 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Shicong Cen , Chen Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Chao Wen , Xiaoyang Tan

Mixture policies theoretically offer greater flexibility than unimodal policies in continuous action reinforcement learning, but the practical benefits of this complexity remain elusive. Mixture policies are notably absent from most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiamin He , Samuel Neumann , Jincheng Mei , Adam White , Martha White

Stochastic Optimal Control provides a unified mathematical framework for solving complex decision-making problems, encompassing paradigms such as maximum entropy reinforcement learning(RL) and imitation learning(IL). However, conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Hang Liu , Sangli Teng , Maani Ghaffari