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Related papers: Variance Adjusted Actor Critic Algorithms

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While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

A key open challenge in agile quadrotor flight is how to combine the flexibility and task-level generality of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with the structure and online replanning capabilities of model predictive control (MPC),…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Angel Romero , Elie Aljalbout , Yunlong Song , Davide Scaramuzza

We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sanjeev Manivannan , Shuban V

In this paper, we propose actor-director-critic, a new framework for deep reinforcement learning. Compared with the actor-critic framework, the director role is added, and action classification and action evaluation are applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Zongwei Liu , Yonghong Song , Yuanlin Zhang

The wide popularity of short videos on social media poses new opportunities and challenges to optimize recommender systems on the video-sharing platforms. Users sequentially interact with the system and provide complex and multi-faceted…

In this paper, we propose an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm to solve a Markov decision process (MDP) formulation for the admission control of elective patients. To manage the elective patients from multiple specialties…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-10 Jian Zhang , Mahjoub Dridi , Abdellah El Moudni

Regularization is a core component of recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Mirror Descent Value Iteration (MDVI) uses both Kullback-Leibler divergence and entropy as regularizers in its value and policy updates. Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Ryo Iwaki

We develop a new policy gradient and actor-critic algorithm for solving mean-field control problems within a continuous time reinforcement learning setting. Our approach leverages a gradient-based representation of the value function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-11 Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin

Existing imitation learning methods mainly focus on making an agent effectively mimic a demonstrated behavior, but do not address the potential contradiction between the behavior style and the objective of a task. There is a general lack of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Mingxi Tan , Andong Tian , Ludovic Denoyer

Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Philippe Preux , Matthieu Geist

Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Tengyu Xu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Yingbin Liang

Accurate value estimates are important for off-policy reinforcement learning. Algorithms based on temporal difference learning typically are prone to an over- or underestimation bias building up over time. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Nicolai Dorka , Tim Welschehold , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

In this paper, we investigate learning temporal abstractions in cooperative multi-agent systems, using the options framework (Sutton et al, 1999). First, we address the planning problem for the decentralized POMDP represented by the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-03-23 Jhelum Chakravorty , Nadeem Ward , Julien Roy , Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert , Sumana Basu , Andrei Lupu , Doina Precup

This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal

We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Semih Cayci , Niao He , R. Srikant

Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

Actor-critic methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various challenging tasks. However, theoretical understandings of their performance remain elusive and challenging. Existing studies mostly focus on practically uncommon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Xuyang Chen , Jingliang Duan , Lin Zhao

To make efficient use of limited spectral resources, we in this work propose a deep actor-critic reinforcement learning based framework for dynamic multichannel access. We consider both a single-user case and a scenario in which multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-23 Chen Zhong , Ziyang Lu , M. Cenk Gursoy , Senem Velipasalar