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Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

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

Most offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms return a target policy maximizing a trade-off between (1) the expected performance gain over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, and (2) the risk stemming from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Zhang-Wei Hong , Pulkit Agrawal , Rémi Tachet des Combes , Romain Laroche

Predicting the future trajectory of a moving agent can be easy when the past trajectory continues smoothly but is challenging when complex interactions with other agents are involved. Recent deep learning approaches for trajectory…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become the standard recipe for improving LLM reasoning, but the dominant algorithm GRPO assigns a single trajectory-level advantage to every token, diluting the signal at pivotal reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yu Li , Rui Miao , Tian Lan , Zhengling Qi

We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ, converge even when using…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Lucas Lehnert , Doina Precup

Policy gradient algorithms have driven many recent advancements in language model reasoning. An appealing property is their ability to learn from exploration on their own trajectories, a process crucial for fostering diverse and creative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Aleksei Petrenko , Ben Lipkin , Kevin Chen , Erik Wijmans , Marco Cusumano-Towner , Raja Giryes , Philipp Krähenbühl

Variable selection or importance measurement of input variables to a machine learning model has become the focus of much research. It is no longer enough to have a good model, one also must explain its decisions. This is why there are so…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Vincent Lemaire , Fabrice Clérot , Marc Boullé

Reinforcement learning provides a mathematical framework for learning-based control, whose success largely depends on the amount of data it can utilize. The efficient utilization of historical trajectories obtained from previous policies is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

On-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms have low data utilization and require significant experience for policy improvement. This paper proposes a proximal policy optimization algorithm with prioritized trajectory replay (PTR-PPO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Xingxing Liang , Yang Ma , Yanghe Feng , Zhong Liu

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

In this paper, we investigate the problem of offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) with human feedback where feedback is available in the form of preference between trajectory pairs rather than explicit rewards. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Nathan Kallus , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

Policy-based reinforcement learning methods suffer from the policy collapse problem. We find valued-based reinforcement learning methods with {\epsilon}-greedy mechanism are capable of enjoying three characteristics, Closed-form Diversity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Changnan Xiao , Haosen Shi , Jiajun Fan , Shihong Deng

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a critical method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, continuous training often leads to policy entropy collapse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Kun Chen , Peng Shi , Fanfan Liu , Haibo Qiu , Zhixiong Zeng , Siqi Yang , Wenji Mao

Restricting the variance of a policy's return is a popular choice in risk-averse Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to its clear mathematical definition and easy interpretability. Traditional methods directly restrict the total return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Yudong Luo , Guiliang Liu , Pascal Poupart , Yangchen Pan

Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Bo Liu , Daoming Lyu , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Gavin McCracken , Colin Daniels , Rosie Zhao , Anna Brandenberger , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup

Built on our previous study on green simulation assisted policy gradient (GS-PG) focusing on trajectory-based reuse, in this paper, we consider infinite-horizon Markov Decision Processes and create a new importance sampling based policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie