Related papers: Analysis of On-policy Policy Gradient Methods unde…
On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions this signal is beneficial and under which it is detrimental. Which teacher model should be used,…
Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…
This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…
Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) can be effectively supported at scale through the use of world models. However, in practice, scaling such approaches remains fundamentally limited. A commonly recognized challenge is model bias and…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…
We develop a normative framework for hierarchical model-based policy optimization based on applying second-order methods in the space of all possible state-action paths. The resulting natural path gradient performs policy updates in a…
In reinforcement learning, the softmax parametrization is the standard approach for policies over discrete action spaces. However, it fails to capture the order relationship between actions. Motivated by a real-world industrial problem, we…
We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…
Policy gradient methods have had great success in solving continuous control tasks, yet the stochastic nature of such problems makes deterministic value estimation difficult. We propose an approach which instead estimates a distribution by…
Exploration and adaptation to new tasks in a transfer learning setup is a central challenge in reinforcement learning. In this work, we build on the idea of modeling a distribution over policies in a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning…
In this paper, we discuss the deterministic policy gradient using the Actor-Critic methods based on the linear compatible advantage function approximator, where the input spaces are continuous. When the policy is restricted by hard…
In offline reinforcement learning, deriving an effective policy from a pre-collected set of experiences is challenging due to the distribution mismatch between the target policy and the behavioral policy used to collect the data, as well as…
We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…
We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…
We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline…
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…