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Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alex X. Lee , Anusha Nagabandi , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

In this work, we study the problem of finding robust and safe policies in Robust Constrained Average-Cost Markov Decision Processes (RCMDPs). A key challenge in this setting is the lack of strong duality, which prevents the direct use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anirudh Satheesh , Sooraj Sathish , Swetha Ganesh , Keenan Powell , Vaneet Aggarwal

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

We study a sequential decision-making problem for a profit-maximizing operator of an autonomous mobility-on-demand system. Optimizing a central operator's vehicle-to-request dispatching policy requires efficient and effective fleet control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-24 Zeno Woywood , Jasper I. Wiltfang , Julius Luy , Tobias Enders , Maximilian Schiffer

Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Sriram Srinivasan , Marc Lanctot , Vinicius Zambaldi , Julien Perolat , Karl Tuyls , Remi Munos , Michael Bowling

Reinforcement learning algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, typically requiring significant manual effort to identify hyperparameters that perform well on a new domain. In this paper, we take a step towards…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to serve as general-purpose tools for various language-based tasks. Recent works have demonstrated that the efficacy of such models can be improved through iterative dialog…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Andrew Estornell , Jean-Francois Ton , Yuanshun Yao , Yang Liu

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 consider the problem of finding stationary Nash equilibria (NE) in a finite discounted general-sum stochastic game. We first generalize a non-linear optimization problem from Filar and Vrieze [2004] to a $N$-player setting and break down…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-06 H. L Prasad , L. A. Prashanth , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We present a novel extension to the family of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithms. We argue that based on the Maximum Entropy Principle, discrete SAC can be further improved via additional statistical constraints derived from a surrogate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Dexter Neo , Tsuhan Chen

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

Bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision problems to maximize the cumulative reward. One potential application is mobile health, where the goal is to promote the user's health through personalized interventions based on user…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-23 Gi-Soo Kim , Hyun-Joon Yang , Jane P. Kim

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Actor-critic methods constitute a central paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), coupling policy evaluation with policy improvement. While effective across many domains, these methods rely on separate actor and critic networks, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Samuel Neumann , Sungsu Lim , Ajin Joseph , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

Deep Actor-Critic algorithms, which combine Actor-Critic with deep neural network (DNN), have been among the most prevalent reinforcement learning algorithms for decision-making problems in simulated environments. However, the existing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Kexuan Wang , An Liu , Baishuo Lin

Deep reinforcement learning for multi-agent cooperation and competition has been a hot topic recently. This paper focuses on cooperative multi-agent problem based on actor-critic methods under local observations settings. Multi agent deep…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hangjun Ye

Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Haque Ishfaq , Guangyuan Wang , Sami Nur Islam , Doina Precup

We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for deep reinforcement learning that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization of deep neural network controllers. We present asynchronous variants of four standard…