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Entropy augmented to reward is known to soften the greedy argmax policy to softmax policy. Entropy augmentation is reformulated and leads to a motivation to introduce an additional entropy term to the objective function in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Donghoon Lee

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated superior performance in enhancing the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). However, this accuracy-oriented learning paradigm often suffers from entropy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Hongye Cao , Zhixin Bai , Ziyue Peng , Boyan Wang , Tianpei Yang , Jing Huo , Yuyao Zhang , Yang Gao

Self-imitation learning motivated by lower-bound Q-learning is a novel and effective approach for off-policy learning. In this work, we propose a n-step lower bound which generalizes the original return-based lower-bound Q-learning, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yunhao Tang

We introduce off-policy distributional Q($\lambda$), a new addition to the family of off-policy distributional evaluation algorithms. Off-policy distributional Q($\lambda$) does not apply importance sampling for off-policy learning, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Yunhao Tang , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Bernardo Ávila Pires , Will Dabney

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

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Aviral Kumar , Aurick Zhou , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

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

Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Rajarshi Banerjee , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Dhaval Parmar Udaybhai

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra

Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…

Modern deep reinforcement learning methods have departed from the incremental learning required for eligibility traces, rendering the implementation of the $\lambda$-return difficult in this context. In particular, off-policy methods that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert behavior using only fixed demonstration data, without any additional online interaction. We propose BiCQL-ML, a policy-free offline IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Junsung Park

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Q-learning, perform poorly in the early stages of learning in noisy environments, because much effort is spent unlearning biased estimates of the state-action value function. The bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-01 Roy Fox , Ari Pakman , Naftali Tishby

Off-policy reinforcement learning holds the promise of sample-efficient learning of decision-making policies by leveraging past experience. However, in the offline RL setting -- where a fixed collection of interactions are provided and no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour , Dale Schuurmans , Shixiang Shane Gu

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

In this work, we present a new model-free and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, that is capable of finding a near-optimal policy with state-action observations from arbitrary behavior policies. Our algorithm, called the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-21 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee , Niao He

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

Full-sampling (e.g., Q-learning) and pure-expectation (e.g., Expected Sarsa) algorithms are efficient and frequently used techniques in reinforcement learning. Q$(\sigma,\lambda)$ is the first approach unifies them with eligibility trace…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Long Yang , Yu Zhang , Qian Zheng , Pengfei Li , Gang Pan

Most of the policy evaluation algorithms are based on the theories of Bellman Expectation and Optimality Equation, which derive two popular approaches - Policy Iteration (PI) and Value Iteration (VI). However, multi-step bootstrapping is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Yuhui Wang , Qingyuan Wu , Pengcheng He , Xiaoyang Tan