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Model-based representations recently stand out as a promising framework that embeds latent dynamics information into the representations for downstream off-policy actor-critic learning. It implicitly combines the advantages of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jiafei Lyu , Zichuan Lin , Scott Fujimoto , Kai Yang , Yangkun Chen , Saiyong Yang , Zongqing Lu , Deheng Ye

On-policy deep reinforcement learning remains a dominant paradigm for continuous control, yet standard implementations rely on Gaussian actors and relatively shallow MLP policies, often leading to brittle optimization when gradients are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yuexin Bian , Jie Feng , Tao Wang , Yijiang Li , Sicun Gao , Yuanyuan Shi

We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

The Doubly Robust (DR) estimation of ATE can be carried out in 2 steps, where in the first step, the treatment and outcome are modeled, and in the second step the predictions are inserted into the DR estimator. The model misspecification in…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-03 Mehdi Rostami , Olli Saarela , Michael Escobar

Value-based deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the estimation bias primarily caused by function approximation and temporal difference (TD) learning. This problem induces faulty state-action value estimates and therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Dogan C. Cicek , Enes Duran , Baturay Saglam , Kagan Kaya , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Taisuke Kobayashi

Approximation of the value functions in value-based deep reinforcement learning induces overestimation bias, resulting in suboptimal policies. We show that when the reinforcement signals received by the agents have a high variance, deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Baturay Saglam , Furkan Burak Mutlu , Dogan Can Cicek , Suleyman Serdar Kozat

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Samin Yeasar Arnob , Doina Precup

We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

Continuous control of non-stationary environments is a major challenge for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The time-dependency of the state transition dynamics aggravates the notorious stability problems of model-free deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Abdullah Akgül , Gulcin Baykal , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Uğurcan Özalp

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have successfully been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. One dominant component of recent deep reinforcement learning algorithms is the target network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Lin Shao , Yifan You , Mengyuan Yan , Qingyun Sun , Jeannette Bohg

Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Olya Mastikhina , Dhruv Sreenivas , Pablo Samuel Castro

Learning systems deployed in nonstationary and safety-critical environments often suffer from instability, slow convergence, or brittle adaptation when learning dynamics evolve over time. While modern optimization, reinforcement learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Akash Samanta , Sheldon Williamson

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Haotian Lin , Pengcheng Wang , Jeff Schneider , Guanya Shi

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is fundamental to intelligent education systems, yet relies on educational logs that are selectively observed. The non-random nature of exercise recommendations and student choices inevitably induces severe selection…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Peilin Zhan , Wei Chen , Weilin Chen , Shuyi Pan , Ruichu Cai

Bias problems in the estimation of $Q$-values are a well-known obstacle that slows down convergence of $Q$-learning and actor-critic methods. One of the reasons of the success of modern RL algorithms is partially a direct or indirect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Leif Döring , Benedikt Wille , Maximilian Birr , Mihail Bîrsan , Martin Slowik

In recommendation systems (RS), user behavior data is observational rather than experimental, resulting in widespread bias in the data. Consequently, tackling bias has emerged as a major challenge in the field of recommendation systems.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-21 ZiJie Song , JiaWei Chen , Sheng Zhou , QiHao Shi , Yan Feng , Chun Chen , Can Wang