# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged off-policy

4

Absolutely, it’s a really interesting problem. Here is a paper detailing off policy actor critic. This is important because this method can also support continuous actions. The general idea of off-policy algorithms is to compare the actions performed by a behaviour policy (which is actually acting in the world) with the actions the target policy (the ...

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A non-starving policy is a (behavior) policy that is theoretically guaranteed to visit each state and take all possible actions from each state an infinite number of times, so that to always update $Q(s, a)$, $\forall s, \forall a$, an infinite number of times. In the context of off-policy prediction, this criterion implies that any trajectory will have no ...

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The concepts of on-policy vs off-policy and online vs offline are separate, but do interact to make certain combinations more feasible. When looking at this, it is worth also considering the difference between prediction and control in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Online vs Offline These concepts are not specific to RL, many learning systems can be ...

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As for your first two questions: there is indeed a behaviour and a target policy, which can be different. In the example image of the $3$-step tree-backup update in the beginning of the section you mention, the actions $A_t$, $A_{t+1}$, and $A_{t+2}$ are assumed to be selected according to some behaviour policy, whereas a (different) target policy is used to ...

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The twist here is that the $a_{t+1}$ in (11) and the $\mu(s_{t+1})$ in (16) are the same and actually the $a_t$ in the on-policy case and the $a_t$ in the off-policy case are different. The key to the understanding is that in on-policy algorithms you have to use actions (and generally speaking trajectories) generated by the policy in the updating steps (to ...

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In respect of RL, is model-free and off-policy the same thing, just different terminology? No, they are entirely different terms, with the only thing they have in common is that they are both ways in which an RL agent can vary. An agent is generally either working off-policy or on-policy, and is generally either model-based or model-free. These things can ...

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You cannot really do that because you have no way of knowing how good the action really is to make reasonable labels for supervised learning (that's the whole point why we need reinforcement learning). The only way to possibly know that is to make labels based on the return that you got from that action but the return is based on an old trajectory with the ...

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The pseudocode you have copied looks incorrect to me, and I think it is from the first edition. The main issue is at the end of the loop. Where the book has $\qquad W \leftarrow W \frac{1}{\mu(A_t|S_t)}$ $\qquad \text{If } W = 0 \text{ then ExitForLoop}$ It should have either $\qquad W \leftarrow W \frac{1}{\mu(A_t|S_t)}$ $\qquad \text{If } ... 2 First, some preliminary questions: in this case, what is the optimal policy? It is the policy that maximises return from any given time step$G_t$. You need to be careful with your definition of return with continuing environments. The simple expected sum of future rewards is likely to be positive or negative infinity. There are three basic approaches: ... 2 Recall that our goal is to be able to accurately estimate the true value of each state by computing a sample average over returns starting from that state: $$v_{q}(s) \doteq \mathbb{E}_{q}\left[G_{t} | S_{t}=s\right] \approx \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=1}^{n} Return_i$$ where$Return_i$is the return obtained from the$i^{th}$trajectory. The problem is that the$\...

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In the application of importance sampling to RL, is the expectation of the function $f$ equivalent to the value of the trajectories, which is represented by the trajectories $x$? I believe what you are asking here is if when using importance sampling in the off-policy RL setting that we set $f(x)$ from the general importance sampling formula to be our ...

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In the DRL nanodegree in Udacity, the instructor says it is possible to combine on- and off-policy learning and suggests the following paper where this has been done: Q-Prop: Sample-Efficient Policy Gradient with An Off-Policy Critic (ICLR 2017). Citing the paper: The core idea is to use the first-order Taylor expansion of the critic as a control ...

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You can simply train a policy from the inputs to predict the actions in your dataset. You can use the cross entropy loss for this, i.e. maximize the the log probability that the policy assigns to the actions in the data set when given the corresponding inputs. This is called behavioral cloning. The result is an approximation of the behavioral policy that ...

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Expected SARSA can be used either on-policy or off-policy. The policy that you use in the update step determines which it is. If the update step uses a different weighting for action choices than the policy that actually took the action, then you are using Expected SARSA in an off-policy way. Q-learning is a special case of Expected SARSA, where the target ...

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First part is correct \begin{align} &\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \alpha(1-\lambda)\lambda^{n-1} (\bar R_t^{(n)} - \theta^T \phi_t)\\ =& \alpha[\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} (1-\lambda)\lambda^{n-1} \bar R_t^{(n)} - \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} (1-\lambda)\lambda^{n-1} \theta^T \phi_t] \end{align} $\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} (1-\lambda)\lambda^{(n-1)}$ sums to $1$ so we have \begin{...

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If your game agent performs any kind of advance learning from self play or database of moves, that will generate parameters for some kind of model (e.g. a table of expected values, or neural network weights to select a preferred action). This is unavoidable, and if you want to re-use the results of that machine learning, you absolutely have to store the ...

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Multiplying the entire update by $\rho$ has the desirable property that experience affects $Q$ less when the behavior policy is unrelated to the target policy. In the extreme, if the trajectory taken has zero probability under the target policy, then $Q$ isn't updated at all, which is good. Alternatively, if only $G$ is scaled by $\rho$, taking zero ...

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I don't think the section was written in haste. I think they just didn't have space to include the whole proof. It's a bit involved, so they just gave concepts. An Emphatic Approach to the Problem of Off-policy Temporal-Difference Learning gives a proof of stability. At least parts of it should seem familiar if you've read Sutton and Barto's proof of the ...

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If you simulate many trajectories and receive many estimates of the two returns you're interested in, you could empirically compare their sample variances. However, the variance of ordinary importance sampling is in general unbounded. If you're wanting some theoretical bounds on the variance of importance sampling estimates, I'd start with weighted ...

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It's because, in the actor-critic algorithm, the objective function is an expectation under the $\tau$ of the policy. If we want to use off-policy data, we have to resort to importance sampling relative to the other policy.

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