English
Related papers

Related papers: A constrained optimization perspective on actor cr…

200 papers

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yulai Zhao , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Jason D. Lee

Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-14 Yemi Okesanjo , Victor Kofia

In this paper, we study the problem of reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems where communication among agents is limited. We develop a decentralized actor-critic learning framework in which each agent performs several local updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Xiaoxing Ren , Nicola Bastianello , Thomas Parisini , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

We consider a discounted cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) policy optimization problem, in which an agent seeks to maximize a discounted cumulative reward subject to a number of constraints on discounted cumulative utilities.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-21 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin

We investigate the discounting mismatch in actor-critic algorithm implementations from a representation learning perspective. Theoretically, actor-critic algorithms usually have discounting for both actor and critic, i.e., there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Shangtong Zhang , Romain Laroche , Harm van Seijen , Shimon Whiteson , Remi Tachet des Combes

This paper studies the networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (NMARL) problem, where the objective of agents is to collaboratively maximize the discounted average cumulative rewards. Different from the existing methods that suffer…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Pengcheng Dai , Yuanqiu Mo , Wenwu Yu , Wei Ren

We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Markus Holzleitner , Lukas Gruber , José Arjona-Medina , Johannes Brandstetter , Sepp Hochreiter

[Zhang, ICML 2018] provided the first decentralized actor-critic algorithm for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) that offers convergence guarantees. In that work, policies are stochastic and are defined on finite action spaces. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Antoine Grosnit , Desmond Cai , Laura Wynter

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Aditya Mahajan

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Intelligent robots provide a new insight into efficiency improvement in industrial and service scenarios to replace human labor. However, these scenarios include dense and dynamic obstacles that make motion planning of robots challenging.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Chengmin Zhou , Bingding Huang , Pasi Fränti

In this work, we consider the problem of computing optimal actions for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in a co-operative setting, where the objective is to optimize a common goal. However, in many real-life applications, in addition to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-08 P. Parnika , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Sai Koti Reddy Danda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

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

We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Mengdi Wang

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor