Related papers: Guide Actor-Critic for Continuous Control
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…
Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…
We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited…
The hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…
We study policy gradient for mean-field control in continuous time in a reinforcement learning setting. By considering randomised policies with entropy regularisation, we derive a gradient expectation representation of the value function,…
Large-scale networked systems, such as traffic, power, and wireless grids, challenge reinforcement-learning agents with both scale and environment shifts. To address these challenges, we propose GSAC (Generalizable and Scalable…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…
The trend is to implement intelligent agents capable of analyzing available information and utilize it efficiently. This work presents a number of reinforcement learning (RL) architectures; one of them is designed for intelligent agents.…
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing tasks, yet they encounter challenges in complex decision-making scenarios that require long-term reasoning and alignment with high-level…
Control contraction metrics (CCMs) provide a framework to co-synthesize a controller and a corresponding contraction metric -- a positive-definite Riemannian metric under which a closed-loop system is guaranteed to be incrementally…
In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…
In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…
We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…
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…
Warm-Start reinforcement learning (RL), aided by a prior policy obtained from offline training, is emerging as a promising RL approach for practical applications. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that the performance of Warm-Start…
The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…
We consider numerical resolution of principal-agent (PA) problems in continuous time. We formulate a generic PA model with continuous and lump payments and a multi-dimensional strategy of the agent. To tackle the resulting…