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arXiv · 2006.03978

Stable and Efficient Policy Evaluation

Daoming Lyu·Bo Liu·Matthieu Geist·Wen Dong·Saad Biaz·Qi Wang
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Abstract

Policy evaluation algorithms are essential to reinforcement learning due to their ability to predict the performance of a policy. However, there are two long-standing issues lying in this prediction problem that need to be tackled: off-policy stability and on-policy efficiency. The conventional temporal difference (TD) algorithm is known to perform very well in the on-policy setting, yet is not off-policy stable. On the other hand, the gradient TD and emphatic TD algorithms are off-policy stable, but are not on-policy efficient. This paper introduces novel algorithms that are both off-policy stable and on-policy efficient by using the oblique projection method. The empirical experimental results on various domains validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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Daoming Lyu, Bo Liu, Matthieu Geist, Wen Dong, Saad Biaz, Qi Wang. 2020-06-06. Stable and Efficient Policy Evaluation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03978

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