English
Related papers

Related papers: Does "Do Differentiable Simulators Give Better Pol…

200 papers

In many real-world reinforcement learning applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed dataset, instead of direct (online) interaction with the environment. When using this data for either evaluation or training of a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Ofir Nachum , Yinlam Chow , Bo Dai , Lihong Li

Restricting the variance of a policy's return is a popular choice in risk-averse Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to its clear mathematical definition and easy interpretability. Traditional methods directly restrict the total return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Yudong Luo , Guiliang Liu , Pascal Poupart , Yangchen Pan

Deep latent variable models have become a popular model choice due to the scalable learning algorithms introduced by (Kingma & Welling, 2013; Rezende et al., 2014). These approaches maximize a variational lower bound on the intractable log…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 George Tucker , Dieterich Lawson , Shixiang Gu , Chris J. Maddison

With the implementation of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, current state-of-art autonomous vehicle technology have the potential to get closer to full automation. However, most of the applications have been limited to game domains…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Wenhui Huang , Francesco Braghin , Zhuo Wang

Deep reinforcement learning agents achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of simulated control tasks. However, successful applications to real-world problems remain limited. One reason for this dichotomy is because the learnt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Rory Young , Nicolas Pugeault

We investigate robust model-free reinforcement learning algorithms designed for environments that may be dynamic or even adversarial. Traditional state-based policies often struggle to accommodate the challenges imposed by the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Udaya Ghai , Arushi Gupta , Wenhan Xia , Karan Singh , Elad Hazan

Training an agent to solve control tasks directly from high-dimensional images with model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has proven difficult. A promising approach is to learn a latent representation together with the control policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Denis Yarats , Amy Zhang , Ilya Kostrikov , Brandon Amos , Joelle Pineau , Rob Fergus

This paper explores the problem of simultaneously learning a value function and policy in deep actor-critic reinforcement learning models. We find that the common practice of learning these functions jointly is sub-optimal, due to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Matthew Aitchison , Penny Sweetser

Due to the high variance of policy gradients, on-policy optimization algorithms are plagued with low sample efficiency. In this work, we propose Augment-Reinforce-Merge (ARM) policy gradient estimator as an unbiased low-variance alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-14 Yunhao Tang , Mingzhang Yin , Mingyuan Zhou

Meta-gradients provide a general approach for optimizing the meta-parameters of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Estimation of meta-gradients is central to the performance of these meta-algorithms, and has been studied in the setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-26 Risto Vuorio , Jacob Beck , Shimon Whiteson , Jakob Foerster , Gregory Farquhar

In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Matthias Lehmann

In real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), noise from inherent stochasticity of environments is inevitable. However, current policy evaluation algorithms, which plays a key role in many RL algorithms, are either prone to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Tadashi Kozuno , Dongqi Han , Kenji Doya

The presence of label noise often misleads the training of deep neural networks. Departing from the recent literature which largely assumes the label noise rate is only determined by the true label class, the errors in human-annotated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Zhaowei Zhu , Tongliang Liu , Yang Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for training Large Language Models is notoriously unstable. While recent studies attribute this to "training inference mismatch stemming" from inconsistent hybrid engines, standard remedies, such as Importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yaxiang Zhang , Yingru Li , Jiacai Liu , Jiawei Xu , Ziniu Li , Qian Liu , Haoyuan Li

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

Value-based deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the estimation bias primarily caused by function approximation and temporal difference (TD) learning. This problem induces faulty state-action value estimates and therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Dogan C. Cicek , Enes Duran , Baturay Saglam , Kagan Kaya , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

Features in machine learning problems are often time-varying and may be related to outputs in an algebraic or dynamical manner. The dynamic nature of these machine learning problems renders current higher order accelerated gradient descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-29 Joseph E. Gaudio , Travis E. Gibson , Anuradha M. Annaswamy , Michael A. Bolender

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving complex decision-making and control tasks. However, many model-free RL algorithms experience performance degradation due to inaccurate value estimation, particularly the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Jingliang Duan , Wenxuan Wang , Liming Xiao , Jiaxin Gao , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Ya-Qin Zhang , Bo Cheng , Keqiang Li

Gradient-based optimization is the foundation of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Even when the mechanism being optimized is unknown or not differentiable, optimization using high-variance or biased gradient estimates is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Will Grathwohl , Dami Choi , Yuhuai Wu , Geoffrey Roeder , David Duvenaud

Gradient-based optimization methods are commonly used to identify local optima in high-dimensional spaces. When derivatives cannot be evaluated directly, stochastic estimators can provide approximate gradients. However, these estimators'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Philipp Andelfinger , Wentong Cai