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We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising framework for addressing robot social navigation challenges. However, inherent uncertainties in pedestrian behavior and limited environmental interaction during training often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Run Su , Hao Fu , Shuai Zhou , Yingao Fu

We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm is one of the most well-known reinforcement learning methods. However, this method is inefficient and unstable in practical applications. On the other hand, the bias and variance of the Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Shuai Han , Wenbo Zhou , Shuai Lü , Jiayu Yu

Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

There is growing interest in reinforcement learning (RL) methods that leverage the simulator's derivatives to improve learning efficiency. While early gradient-based approaches have demonstrated superior performance compared to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Joseph Amigo , Rooholla Khorrambakht , Elliot Chane-Sane , Nicolas Mansard , Ludovic Righetti

We work towards a unifying paradigm for accelerating policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating foresight in the policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates. Leveraging the connection between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Veronica Chelu , Tom Zahavy , Arthur Guez , Doina Precup , Sebastian Flennerhag

Transfer Learning (TL) has shown great potential to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) by leveraging prior knowledge from past learned policies of relevant tasks. Existing transfer approaches either explicitly computes the similarity…

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Junyu Zhang , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Experience replay is a core ingredient of modern deep reinforcement learning, yet its benefits in policy optimization are poorly understood beyond empirical heuristics. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for experience replay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng

Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Muhammad A. Masood , Finale Doshi-Velez

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

Experience replay (ER) is a fundamental component of off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL). ER recalls experiences from past iterations to compute gradient estimates for the current policy, increasing data-efficiency. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Guido Novati , Petros Koumoutsakos

Typical reinforcement learning (RL) methods for LLM reasoning waste compute on hard problems, where correct on-policy traces are rare, policy gradients vanish, and learning stalls. To bootstrap more efficient RL, we consider reusing old…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Amrith Setlur , Zijian Wang , Andrew Cohen , Paria Rashidinejad , Sang Michael Xie

Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

We study the problem of robust reinforcement learning under adversarial corruption on both rewards and transitions. Our attack model assumes an \textit{adaptive} adversary who can arbitrarily corrupt the reward and transition at every step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Xuezhou Zhang , Yiding Chen , Xiaojin Zhu , Wen Sun

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

Recent breakthroughs both in reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization have made significant advances towards real world robotic system deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied to many problems without needing any…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Guillaume Bellegarda , Katie Byl

Reinforcement learning means learning a policy--a mapping of observations into actions--based on feedback from the environment. The learning can be viewed as browsing a set of policies while evaluating them by trial through interaction with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Leonid Peshkin , Virginia Savova