Adapts GRPO for off-policy RL, improving reward.
problem Improving training stability and efficiency in RL.
method Adapts GRPO to off-policy setting, uses clipped surrogate objectives.
result Off-policy GRPO outperforms on-policy GRPO in empirical tests.
HO2 learns options from data efficiently, improving robot manipulation tasks.
problem Learning options from raw pixel inputs in 3D robot manipulation tasks.
method HO2 infers likely option choices and trains all policy components off-policy.
result HO2 outperforms existing methods on 3D robot manipulation tasks.
Simplifies RL training with fewer techniques, reducing bias and instability.
problem Training instabilities and high sample complexity in RL.
method Introduced a simple deterministic policy gradient, used propensity estimation, and delayed policy updates.
result Improved performance and reduced sample complexity through these techniques.
Paper uses RL and diffusion models to solve Bayesian inverse problems.
problem Bayesian inverse problems with latent biases.
method Relative Trajectory Balance (RTB) for RL, conditional diffusion models, off-policy backtracking exploration.
result RTB improves diffusion model posteriors for inverse problems.
New algorithm for sequential off-policy learning improves performance over batch methods.
problem Training policies from logged interaction data in a sequential setting.
method Combines Logarithmic Smoothing with online PAC-Bayesian tools.
result Improves performance and accelerates convergence in sequential off-policy learning.
We develop an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for learning an optimal policy from a training set composed of data from multiple individuals. This algorithm is developed with a view towards its use in mobile health.
DOLCE improves off-policy evaluation and learning by decomposing effects.
problem Bias in off-policy evaluation and learning due to policy mismatch.
method Uses lagged contexts and a moment-based training procedure to decompose and cancel bias.
result DOLCE achieves substantial improvements in off-policy evaluation and learning.
Improved diffusion models for sampling from given distributions.
problem Training diffusion models to sample from a given distribution.
method Benchmarked and improved off-policy methods for diffusion sampling.
result A novel exploration strategy improves sample quality.
Off-policy reinforcement learning aims to leverage experience collected from prior policies for sample-efficient learning. However, in practice, commonly used off-policy approximate dynamic programming methods based on Q-learning and actor-critic methods are highly sensitive to the data distribution, and can make only …
SUNRISE improves off-policy RL algorithms by integrating ensemble methods.
problem Stability and exploration issues in off-policy RL algorithms.
method SUNRISE combines ensemble-based weighted Bellman backups and upper-confidence bounds for efficient exploration.
result SUNRISE improves the performance of off-policy RL algorithms across various domains.
Paper addresses off-policy evaluation and learning with covariate shift.
problem Evaluating and training a new policy using historical data with a covariate shift.
method Derives efficiency bounds and proposes doubly robust estimators for OPE and OPL under covariate shift.
result Proposes estimators for off-policy evaluation and learning under covariate shift.
Meta-Q-Learning improves meta-Reinforcement Learning using past data.
problem Improving meta-Reinforcement Learning performance.
method Meta-Q-Learning combines Q-learning, multi-task objectives, and off-policy updates to adapt policies from past data.
result Meta-Q-Learning compares favorably with state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms on benchmarks.
Hybrid RL algorithm combines offline and online data for robust and efficient policy learning.
problem Combining robust on-policy methods with efficient offline data for hybrid RL.
method Integrates off-policy training on offline data into on-policy NPG framework.
result Achieves state-of-the-art theoretical guarantees and maintains on-policy NPG guarantees.
Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment. These are critical shortcomings for applying RL to real-world problems where collecting data is expensive, and models must be tested offline before being dep…
In this paper, we point out a fundamental property of the objective in reinforcement learning, with which we can reformulate the policy gradient objective into a perceptron-like loss function, removing the need to distinguish between on and off policy training. Namely, we posit that it is sufficient to only update a po…
Improved off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits with better guarantees.
problem Selecting or training a reward-maximizing policy using data from a fixed behavior policy.
method A betting-based confidence bound applied to an inverse propensity weight sequence for off-policy selection, and a freezing condition for off-policy learning.
result The proposed methods achieve significantly improved guarantees over prior work, especially in small-data regimes.
Improves reinforcement learning stability and efficiency.
problem Combining stability and efficiency in reinforcement learning.
method Combines on-policy stability with off-policy sample reuse.
result Demonstrates improved performance in both theory and practice.
Paper introduces a meta-critic for accelerating off-policy actor-critic learning.
problem Improving sample efficiency in continuous control tasks.
method Meta-critic that meta-learns an additional loss for the actor.
result Online meta-critic learning leads to improved performance in various continuous control environments.
This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large errors. We define the problem of off-policy evaluation for Partially Observable Mark…
PBVFs generalize across policies using learned value functions.
problem RL algorithms forget information about old policies when updating value functions to track the learned policy.
method Introduce Parameter-Based Value Functions (PBVFs) that include policy parameters in their inputs, enabling them to generalize across different policies.
result PBVFs enable zero-shot learning of new policies that outperform any policy seen during training.
MetaGenRL learns a general objective function from diverse agents.
problem Generalizing to new environments in reinforcement learning.
method MetaGenRL distills experiences from many agents into a low-complexity neural objective function.
result MetaGenRL can generalize to new environments and outperforms human-engineered algorithms.
New method improves off-policy critic evaluation in reinforcement learning.
problem High variance and instability in off-policy policy evaluation.
method Doubly robust estimators applied to actor-critic algorithms.
result Doubly robust estimation significantly improves performance in continuous control tasks.
The paper introduces a new framework for off-policy reinforcement learning.
problem Improving off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms.
method Conceptual framework based on conditional importance sampling.
result Theoretical analysis and concrete algorithm investigation.
A streamlined DRL algorithm improves sample efficiency without entropy maximization.
problem Improving sample efficiency in off-policy DRL algorithms.
method Output normalization and non-uniform sampling.
result Proposed algorithm matches SAC's performance without entropy maximization and improves sample efficiency.
In this paper, we explore deep reinforcement learning algorithms for vision-based robotic grasping. Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a range of challenging environments, but the proliferation of algorithms makes it difficult to discern which particular approach would be best …
Discrete diffusion samplers improve sampling from unnormalised densities.
problem Sampling from discrete unnormalised densities efficiently.
method Introduce off-policy training techniques and data-to-energy Schrödinger bridge training for discrete diffusion samplers.
result Improved performance on synthetic and new benchmarks.
Evolutionary Strategies optimize hyper-parameters for off-policy learning.
problem Hyper-parameter sensitivity in off-policy learning.
method Application of Evolutionary Strategies for online hyper-parameter tuning.
result Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
New method reduces state distribution mismatch in off-policy RL.
problem State distribution mismatch in off-policy RL algorithms.
method Develops a novel constrained off-policy gradient objective to minimize state distribution shift.
result Minimizing state distribution shift improves performance in off-policy RL algorithms.
Many reinforcement learning applications involve the use of data that is sensitive, such as medical records of patients or financial information. However, most current reinforcement learning methods can leak information contained within the (possibly sensitive) data on which they are trained. To address this problem, w…
This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy while following a distinct behavior policy. To this end, the paper develops a multi-…
Memory-efficient algorithm reduces variance in off-policy RL.
problem High variance in off-policy policy optimization.
method Memory-efficient, stochastically variance-reduced algorithm using off-policy samples.
result Empirically validated effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Paper improves bootstrapping for off-policy reinforcement learning inference.
problem Improving bootstrapping for off-policy reinforcement learning inference.
method Proposes a bootstrapping FQE method for off-policy statistical inference and a subsampling procedure to improve runtime.
result Asymptotically efficient and distributionally consistent bootstrapping FQE method for off-policy inference.
We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of transition probabilities. We prove that such approximate corrections are sufficien…
A new estimator improves off-policy evaluation in RL, outperforming existing methods.
problem Estimating performance of a new policy using historical data from a different policy.
method Doubly-robust estimator based on Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation, with variance reduction techniques.
result Our estimator uniformly outperforms existing methods across various RL environments and levels of model misspecification.
Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot scale to tasks with very high state and action dimensionality such as 3D humanoid l…
COF-PAC converges with novel critic and learning method.
problem Convergent off-policy actor-critic with function approximation.
method Two-timescale approach with Gradient Emphasis Learning (GEM).
result First provably convergent COF-PAC with linear critics and nonlinear actor.
Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) using a fixed offline dataset of logged interactions is an important consideration in real world applications. This paper studies offline RL using the DQN replay dataset comprising the entire replay experience of a DQN agent on 60 Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that recent off-p…
The paper introduces a novel method for stable off-policy learning using value function chaining.
problem Stability issues in off-policy reinforcement learning.
method The approach involves learning on-policy first, then chaining off-policy value estimates.
result The method guarantees convergence and can approximate off-policy TD solutions.
Enhances large language models' reasoning through simpler off-policy reinforcement learning.
problem Improving large language models' ability to reason and solve problems.
method EM Policy Gradient, optimizing expected return over reasoning trajectories using Expectation-Maximization (EM) optimization.
result Achieves comparable or slightly superior performance to state-of-the-art methods on reasoning datasets, with additional cognitive behaviors.
Off-policy learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy (π) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause of instability. High variance also originates from distributional mismatch. The var…
Optimizes antenna tilt for better QoS in cellular networks.
problem Hard to learn optimal antenna tilt policies in real networks due to risk and simulation gap.
method Uses off-policy Contextual Multi-Armed-Bandit (CMAB) techniques to learn from existing data.
result Trained policies show consistent improvements over existing logging policies.
Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true value function V. Two novel algorithms are proposed to approximate the true value…
In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment. However, comparing models in a real-world environment for the purposes of early …
RO-TD learns sparse value functions efficiently.
problem Learning sparse value functions efficiently.
method RO-TD integrates off-policy convergent gradient TD methods and online convex regularization.
result RO-TD learns sparse value functions with low computational complexity.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience, several major challenges preclude their practicality. Current methods rely heavi…
Paper bridges VI and GFlowNets, showing their equivalence in certain cases.
problem Modeling distributions over continuous and discrete structures.
method Demonstrates equivalence between VI and GFlowNets in specific scenarios.
result GFlowNets are more suitable for off-policy training without high gradient variance.
Stabilizes policy optimization with off-policy data using divergence augmentation.
problem Premature convergence and instability in policy optimization with off-policy data.
method Incorporates Bregman divergence between behavior and current policies to ensure safe policy updates.
result Empirically shows better performance in data-scarce scenarios compared to other algorithms.
Efficient actor-critic learning with shared experience replay improves data efficiency.
problem Challenges in actor-critic reinforcement learning with experience replay and off-policy learning stability.
method Combining actor-critic algorithms with shared experience replay, analyzing V-trace, proposing a trust region scheme.
result State-of-the-art data efficiency on Atari achieved with 200M environment frames.