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Flow $Q$-learning has recently been introduced to integrate learning from expert demonstrations into an actor-critic structure. Central to this innovation is the ``the one-step policy'' network, which is optimized through a $Q$-function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-17 Farnaz Adib Yaghmaie , Arunava Naha

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but counteracting off-policy bias without exacerbating variance is challenging. Classically, off-policy bias is corrected in a per-decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Brett Daley , Martha White , Christopher Amato , Marlos C. Machado

In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

We consider the problem of sequential recommendation, where the current recommendation is made based on past interactions. This recommendation task requires efficient processing of the sequential data and aims to provide recommendations…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Xumei Xi , Yuke Zhao , Quan Liu , Liwen Ouyang , Yang Wu

Pre-training with offline data and online fine-tuning using reinforcement learning is a promising strategy for learning control policies by leveraging the best of both worlds in terms of sample efficiency and performance. One natural…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Haichao Zhang , We Xu , Haonan Yu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising direction to exploit massive amount of offline data for complex decision-making tasks. Due to the distribution shift issue, current offline RL algorithms are generally designed to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Rui Yang , Chenjia Bai , Xiaoteng Ma , Zhaoran Wang , Chongjie Zhang , Lei Han

Learning policies from previously recorded data is a promising direction for real-world robotics tasks, as online learning is often infeasible. Dexterous manipulation in particular remains an open problem in its general form. The…

In many real-world applications, collecting large and high-quality datasets may be too costly or impractical. Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to infer an optimal decision-making policy from a fixed set of data. Getting the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Charles A. Hepburn , Giovanni Montana

By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Jared Markowitz , Jesse Silverberg , Gary Collins

We present SoftDICE, which achieves state-of-the-art performance for imitation learning. SoftDICE fixes several key problems in ValueDICE, an off-policy distribution matching approach for sample-efficient imitation learning. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Mingfei Sun , Anuj Mahajan , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Off-policy algorithms, in which a behavior policy differs from the target policy and is used to gain experience for learning, have proven to be of great practical value in reinforcement learning. However, even for simple convex problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Rong J. B. Zhu , James M. Murray

Offline learning is a key part of making reinforcement learning (RL) useable in real systems. Offline RL looks at scenarios where there is data from a system's operation, but no direct access to the system when learning a policy. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Arthur Argenson , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold

The utilization of online stochastic algorithms is popular in large-scale learning settings due to their ability to compute updates on the fly, without the need to store and process data in large batches. When a constant step-size is used,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-19 Stefan Vlaski , Elsa Rizk , Ali H. Sayed

Offline reinforcement learning enables learning from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. The lack of environmental interactions makes the policy training vulnerable to state-action pairs far from the training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Shentao Yang , Zhendong Wang , Huangjie Zheng , Yihao Feng , Mingyuan Zhou

Recent advances in batch (offline) reinforcement learning have shown promising results in learning from available offline data and proved offline reinforcement learning to be an essential toolkit in learning control policies in a model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Ashish Kumar , Ilya Kuzovkin

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

Policy gradient (PG) algorithms have been widely used in reinforcement learning (RL). However, PG algorithms rely on exploiting the value function being learned with the first-order update locally, which results in limited sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Hao Sun , Ziping Xu , Yuhang Song , Meng Fang , Jiechao Xiong , Bo Dai , Bolei Zhou

Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-18 Ali Baheri

Sample efficiency is one of the most critical issues for online reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods achieve higher sample efficiency by adopting model-based methods, Q-ensemble, or better exploration mechanisms. We, instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jiafei Lyu , Le Wan , Zongqing Lu , Xiu Li