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Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

We present differentiable predictive control (DPC), a method for learning constrained neural control policies for linear systems with probabilistic performance guarantees. We employ automatic differentiation to obtain direct policy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-28 Jan Drgona , Aaron Tuor , Draguna Vrabie

Policy gradient methods have become one of the most popular classes of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. A key challenge, however, that is not addressed by many of these methods is multi-agent credit assignment: assessing…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Jacopo Castellini , Sam Devlin , Frans A. Oliehoek , Rahul Savani

Uncertainty quantification is one of the central challenges for machine learning in real-world applications. In reinforcement learning, an agent confronts two kinds of uncertainty, called epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Takuya Kanazawa , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

Considering generating samples with high rewards, we focus on optimizing deep neural networks parameterized stochastic differential equations (SDEs), the advanced generative models with high expressiveness, with policy gradient, the leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Xiangxin Zhou , Liang Wang , Yichi Zhou

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank

Many deep reinforcement learning algorithms contain inductive biases that sculpt the agent's objective and its interface to the environment. These inductive biases can take many forms, including domain knowledge and pretuned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-08 Matteo Hessel , Hado van Hasselt , Joseph Modayil , David Silver

Sequence-to-sequence architectures built upon recurrent neural networks have become a standard choice for multi-step-ahead time series prediction. In these models, the decoder produces future values conditioned on contextual inputs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Qi Sima , Xinze Zhang , Yukun Bao , Siyue Yang , Liang Shen

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

There is growing interest in reinforcement learning (RL) methods that leverage the simulator's derivatives to improve learning efficiency. While early gradient-based approaches have demonstrated superior performance compared to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Joseph Amigo , Rooholla Khorrambakht , Elliot Chane-Sane , Nicolas Mansard , Ludovic Righetti

Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Muhammad A. Masood , Finale Doshi-Velez

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

Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Tianbing Xu , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

The task of estimating the gradient of a function in the presence of noise is central to several forms of reinforcement learning, including policy search methods. We present two techniques for reducing gradient estimation errors in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Gregory Lawrence , Noah Cowan , Stuart Russell

Differentiable simulators promise to improve sample efficiency in robot learning by providing analytic gradients of the system dynamics. Yet, their application to contact-rich tasks like locomotion is complicated by the inherently…

One major obstacle that precludes the success of reinforcement learning in real-world applications is the lack of robustness, either to model uncertainties or external disturbances, of the trained policies. Robustness is critical when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Rahul Singh , Qinsheng Zhang , Yongxin Chen

Standard policy gradients weight each sampled action by advantage alone, regardless of how likely that action was under the current policy. This creates two pathologies: within a single decision context (e.g. one image or prompt), a rare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ian Osband

Using the policy gradient algorithm, we train a single-hidden-layer neural network to balance a physically accurate simulation of a single inverted pendulum. The trained weights and biases can then be transferred to a physical agent, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Dylan Bates