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The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Mattis Manfred Kämmerer

Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Peter Henderson , Joshua Romoff , Joelle Pineau

Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 João Carvalho , Davide Tateo , Fabio Muratore , Jan Peters

Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Joao Carvalho , Jan Peters

Off-policy algorithms, in which a behavior policy differs from the target policy and is used to gain experience for learning, have proven to be of great practical value in reinforcement learning. However, even for simple convex problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Rong J. B. Zhu , James M. Murray

Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Bernhard Schölkopf , Sergey Levine

While backpropagation--reverse-mode automatic differentiation--has been extraordinarily successful in deep learning, it requires two passes (forward and backward) through the neural network and the storage of intermediate activations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Daniel Wang , Evan Markou , Dylan Campbell

This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qianyi Chen , Ying Chen , Bo Li

In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Most zeroth-order optimization algorithms mimic a first-order algorithm but replace the gradient of the objective function with some gradient estimator that can be computed from a small number of function evaluations. This estimator is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-12 Wouter Jongeneel , Man-Chung Yue , Daniel Kuhn

This work adopts the very successful distributional perspective on reinforcement learning and adapts it to the continuous control setting. We combine this within a distributed framework for off-policy learning in order to develop what we…

There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Lex Weaver , Nigel Tao

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

Model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning requires estimating the Hessian matrix of value functions. This is challenging from an implementation perspective, as repeatedly differentiating policy gradient estimates may lead to biased Hessian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Yunhao Tang , Tadashi Kozuno , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

We derive an unbiased estimator for expectations over discrete random variables based on sampling without replacement, which reduces variance as it avoids duplicate samples. We show that our estimator can be derived as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Wouter Kool , Herke van Hoof , Max Welling

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have been demonstrated to be effective in a wide range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from severe action oscillations in particular in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Chen Chen , Hongyao Tang , Jianye Hao , Wulong Liu , Zhaopeng Meng

Queuing network control is essential for managing congestion in job-processing systems such as service systems, communication networks, and manufacturing processes. Despite growing interest in applying reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Ethan Che , Jing Dong , Hongseok Namkoong

This paper presents a robust reinforcement learning algorithm called robust deterministic policy gradient (RDPG), which reformulates the H-infinity control problem as a two-player zero-sum dynamic game between a user and an adversary. The…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee