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Natural actor-critic (NAC) and its variants, equipped with the representation power of neural networks, have demonstrated impressive empirical success in solving Markov decision problems with large state spaces. In this paper, we present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Semih Cayci , Niao He , R. Srikant

We examine online safe multi-agent reinforcement learning using constrained Markov games in which agents compete by maximizing their expected total rewards under a constraint on expected total utilities. Our focus is confined to an episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Dongsheng Ding , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mihailo R. Jovanović

This paper presents the Relaxed Continuous-Time Actor-critic (RCTAC) algorithm, a method for finding the nearly optimal policy for nonlinear continuous-time (CT) systems with known dynamics and infinite horizon, such as the path-tracking…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-31 Jingliang Duan , Jie Li , Qiang Ge , Shengbo Eben Li , Monimoy Bujarbaruah , Fei Ma , Dezhao Zhang

Cooperative multi-agent systems can be naturally used to model many real world problems, such as network packet routing and the coordination of autonomous vehicles. There is a great need for new reinforcement learning methods that can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Jakob Foerster , Gregory Farquhar , Triantafyllos Afouras , Nantas Nardelli , Shimon Whiteson

In traditional reinforcement learning, an agent maximizes the reward collected during its interaction with the environment by approximating the optimal policy through the estimation of value functions. Typically, given a state s and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Shangda Li , Selina Bing , Steven Yang

In this paper we design and evaluate a Deep-Reinforcement Learning agent that optimizes routing. Our agent adapts automatically to current traffic conditions and proposes tailored configurations that attempt to minimize the network delay.…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2017-09-22 Giorgio Stampa , Marta Arias , David Sanchez-Charles , Victor Muntes-Mulero , Albert Cabellos

This paper presents an axiomatic approach to finite Markov decision processes where the discount rate is zero. One of the principal difficulties in the no discounting case is that, even if attention is restricted to stationary policies, a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-23 Adam Jonsson

Bounded agents are limited by intrinsic constraints on their ability to process information that is available in their sensors and memory and choose actions and memory updates. In this dissertation, we model these constraints as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-31 Roy Fox

We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-28 Ershad Banijamali , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Nikos Vlassis

Reinforcement learning (RL) actor-critic algorithms enable autonomous learning but often require a large number of environment interactions, which limits their applicability in robotics. Leveraging expert data can reduce the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Andreas Kernbach , Amr Elsheikh , Nicolas Grupp , René Nagel , Marco F. Huber

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We propose networked policy gradient play for solving Markov potential games with continuous and/or discrete state-action pairs. During the game, agents use parametrized and differentiable policies that depend on the current state and the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-02 Sarper Aydin , Ceyhun Eksin

Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Ehsan Imani , Eric Graves , Martha White

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has attracted much research attention recently. However, unlike its single-agent counterpart, many theoretical and algorithmic aspects of MARL have not been well-understood. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Siliang Zeng , Tianyi Chen , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

We study a multi-agent reinforcement learning dynamics, and analyze its asymptotic behavior in infinite-horizon discounted Markov potential games. We focus on the independent and decentralized setting, where players do not know the game…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Chinmay Maheshwari , Manxi Wu , Druv Pai , Shankar Sastry

We investigate the neural Actor Critic algorithm using shallow neural networks for both the Actor and Critic models. The focus of this work is twofold: first, to compare the convergence properties of the network outputs under various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Nikos Georgoudios , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos , Justin Sirignano

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yaakov Engel , Michal Valko

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for consensus optimization over networks and a robust extension tailored to deal with asynchronous agents and packet losses. Indeed, to robustly achieve dynamic consensus on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Guido Carnevale , Nicola Bastianello , Giuseppe Notarstefano , Ruggero Carli

Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Olya Mastikhina , Dhruv Sreenivas , Pablo Samuel Castro