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This paper presents AFU, an off-policy deep RL algorithm addressing in a new way the challenging "max-Q problem" in Q-learning for continuous action spaces, with a solution based on regression and conditional gradient scaling. AFU has an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert

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

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

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman , Mohsen Zamani

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Debidatta Dwibedi , Sergey Levine , Jonathan Tompson

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

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

For continuous action spaces, actor-critic methods are widely used in online reinforcement learning (RL). However, unlike RL algorithms for discrete actions, which generally model the optimal value function using the Bellman optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Motoki Omura , Kazuki Ota , Takayuki Osa , Yusuke Mukuta , Tatsuya Harada

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 study the convergence of the actor-critic algorithm with nonlinear function approximation under a nonconvex-nonconcave primal-dual formulation. Stochastic gradient descent ascent is applied with an adaptive proximal term for robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Jing Dong , Li Shen , Yinggan Xu , Baoxiang Wang

We propose Adversarially Trained Actor Critic (ATAC), a new model-free algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) under insufficient data coverage, based on the concept of relative pessimism. ATAC is designed as a two-player…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Ching-An Cheng , Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

We propose A-Crab (Actor-Critic Regularized by Average Bellman error), a new practical algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) in complex environments with insufficient data coverage. Our algorithm combines the marginalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Hanlin Zhu , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani

Reinforcement learning has gathered much attention in recent years due to its rapid development and rich applications, especially on control systems and robotics. When tackling real-world applications with reinforcement learning method, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Andy Wu , Chun-Cheng Lin , Rung-Tzuo Liaw , Yuehua Huang , Chihjung Kuo , Chia Tong Weng

We present an actor-critic framework for MDPs where the objective is the variance-adjusted expected return. Our critic uses linear function approximation, and we extend the concept of compatible features to the variance-adjusted setting. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-10-15 Aviv Tamar , Shie Mannor

To obtain better value estimation in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel algorithm based on the double actor-critic framework with temporal difference error-driven regularization, abbreviated as TDDR. TDDR employs double actors, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Haohui Chen , Zhiyong Chen , Aoxiang Liu , Wentuo Fang

The oscillating performance of off-policy learning and persisting errors in the actor-critic (AC) setting call for algorithms that can conservatively learn to suit the stability-critical applications better. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Lingwei Zhu , Toshinori Kitamura , Takamitsu Matsubara

Actor-Critic models are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that have demonstrated effectiveness across various robot learning tasks. While considerable research has focused on improving training stability and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Hanlan Yang , Itamar Mishani , Luca Pivetti , Zachary Kingston , Maxim Likhachev

Training critiquing language models to assess and provide feedback on model outputs is a promising way to improve LLMs for complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches typically rely on stronger supervisors for annotating critique…

This paper presents a new method --- adversarial advantage actor-critic (Adversarial A2C), which significantly improves the efficiency of dialogue policy learning in task-completion dialogue systems. Inspired by generative adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-02-09 Baolin Peng , Xiujun Li , Jianfeng Gao , Jingjing Liu , Yun-Nung Chen , Kam-Fai Wong