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Related papers: Delightful Distributed Policy Gradient

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The transfer of knowledge from one policy to another is an important tool in Deep Reinforcement Learning. This process, referred to as distillation, has been used to great success, for example, by enhancing the optimisation of agents,…

This paper presents a constrained policy gradient algorithm. We introduce constraints for safe learning with the following steps. First, learning is slowed down (lazy learning) so that the episodic policy change can be computed with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-24 Balázs Varga , Balázs Kulcsár , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Due to the sparse rewards and high degree of environment variation, reinforcement learning approaches such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) are plagued by issues of high variance when applied in complex real world environments.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-28 Linhai Xie , Yishu Miao , Sen Wang , Phil Blunsom , Zhihua Wang , Changhao Chen , Andrew Markham , Niki Trigoni

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

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

Despite the success achieved by the analysis of supervised learning algorithms in the framework of statistical mechanics, reinforcement learning has remained largely untouched. Here we move towards closing the gap by analyzing the dynamics…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-09-02 Riccardo Fabbricatore , Vladimir V. Palyulin

Deterministic policy gradient (DPG) is widely utilized for continuous control; however, it inherently relies on the differentiability of the critic with respect to the action during policy updates. This assumption is violated in practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hyunjun Na , Donghwan Lee

Reinforcement learning is crucial for aligning large language models to perform complex reasoning tasks. However, current algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization suffer from coarse grained, sequence level credit assignment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongbo Jin , Rongpeng Zhu , Zhongjing Du , Xu Jiang , Jingqi Tian , Qiaoman Zhang , Jiayu Ding

Reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but learned policies often degrade in performance when test conditions differ from the training distribution. This limitation is especially important in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Shaifalee Saxena , Rafael Fierro , Alexander Scheinker

Stochastic resetting, where a dynamical process is intermittently returned to a fixed reference state, has emerged as a powerful mechanism for optimizing first-passage properties. Existing theory largely treats static, non-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Jello Zhou , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

Understanding the advantages of deep neural networks trained by gradient descent (GD) compared to shallow models remains an open theoretical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a class of target functions (single and multi-index Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-17 Yatin Dandi , Luca Pesce , Lenka Zdeborová , Florent Krzakala

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

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

We introduce Policy Gradient Guidance (PGG), a simple extension of classifier-free guidance from diffusion models to classical policy gradient methods. PGG augments the policy gradient with an unconditional branch and interpolates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jianing Qi , Hao Tang , Zhigang Zhu

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

Lane change is a challenging task which requires delicate actions to ensure safety and comfort. Some recent studies have attempted to solve the lane-change control problem with Reinforcement Learning (RL), yet the action is confined to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Pin Wang , Hanhan Li , Ching-Yao Chan

Robust imitation learning using disturbance injections overcomes issues of limited variation in demonstrations. However, these methods assume demonstrations are optimal, and that policy stabilization can be learned via simple augmentations.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Hirotaka Tahara , Hikaru Sasaki , Hanbit Oh , Brendan Michael , Takamitsu Matsubara

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain