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The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction for learning policies from pre-collected datasets without requiring further interactions with the environment. However, existing methods struggle to handle out-of-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Zhepeng Cen , Zuxin Liu , Zitong Wang , Yihang Yao , Henry Lam , Ding Zhao

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Teng Xiao , Suhang Wang

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MaxEnt-RL) has become the standard approach to RL due to its beneficial exploration properties. Traditionally, policies are parameterized using Gaussian distributions, which significantly limits their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Onur Celik , Zechu Li , Denis Blessing , Ge Li , Daniel Palenicek , Jan Peters , Georgia Chalvatzaki , Gerhard Neumann

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

We introduce a methodology for efficiently computing a lower bound to empowerment, allowing it to be used as an unsupervised cost function for policy learning in real-time control. Empowerment, being the channel capacity between actions and…

We introduce a new algorithm for reinforcement learning called Maximum aposteriori Policy Optimisation (MPO) based on coordinate ascent on a relative entropy objective. We show that several existing methods can directly be related to our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Abbas Abdolmaleki , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Yuval Tassa , Remi Munos , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

In many real-world scenarios, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are trained on data with dynamics shift, i.e., with different underlying environment dynamics. A majority of current methods address such issue by training context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Zhenghai Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Shuchang Liu , Dong Zheng , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Ben London , Levi Lu , Ted Sandler , Thorsten Joachims

This paper proposes an off-policy risk-sensitive reinforcement learning based control framework for stabilization of a continuous-time nonlinear system that subjects to additive disturbances, input saturation, and state constraints. By…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-21 Cong Li , Qingchen Liu , Zhehua Zhou , Martin Buss , Fangzhou Liu

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Disha Shrivastava , Eeshan Gunesh Dhekane , Riashat Islam

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

One important property of DIstribution Correction Estimation (DICE) methods is that the solution is the optimal stationary distribution ratio between the optimized and data collection policy. In this work, we show that DICE-based methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Liyuan Mao , Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Weinan Zhang , Amy Zhang

Off-policy learning and evaluation leverage logged bandit feedback datasets, which contain context, action, propensity score, and feedback for each data point. These scenarios face significant challenges due to high variance and poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Armin Behnamnia , Gholamali Aminian , Alireza Aghaei , Chengchun Shi , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Hamid R. Rabiee

An important problem that arises in reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo methods is estimating quantities defined by the stationary distribution of a Markov chain. In many real-world applications, access to the underlying transition…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-24 Ruiyi Zhang , Bo Dai , Lihong Li , Dale Schuurmans