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Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Alonso Granados , Jason Pacheco

This study proposes the use of a social learning method to estimate a global state within a multi-agent off-policy actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) operating in a partially observable environment. We assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Ainur Zhaikhan , Ali H. Sayed

We propose a new policy iteration theory as an important extension of soft policy iteration and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), one of the most efficient model free algorithms for deep reinforcement learning. Supported by the new theory, arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng

We show that the simplest actor-critic method -- a linear softmax policy updated with TD through interaction with a linear MDP, but featuring no explicit regularization or exploration -- does not merely find an optimal policy, but moreover…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Yuzheng Hu , Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky

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

Existing Maximum-Entropy (MaxEnt) Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods for continuous action spaces are typically formulated based on actor-critic frameworks and optimized through alternating steps of policy evaluation and policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Chen-Hao Chao , Chien Feng , Wei-Fang Sun , Cheng-Kuang Lee , Simon See , Chun-Yi Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents can leverage batches of previously collected data to extract a reasonable control policy. An emerging issue in this offline RL setting, however, is that the bootstrapping update underlying many of our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Chenjun Xiao , Han Wang , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

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

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven a powerful technique in many sequential decision making domains. However, Robotics poses many challenges for RL, most notably training on a physical system can be expensive and dangerous, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-10-19 Lerrel Pinto , Marcin Andrychowicz , Peter Welinder , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Tanuja Joshi , Hariprasad Kodamana , Harikumar Kandath , Niket Kaisare

Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Weichen Li , Rati Devidze , Sophie Fellenz

Pretraining reinforcement learning methods with demonstrations has been an important concept in the study of reinforcement learning since a large amount of computing power is spent on online simulations with existing reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Xiaoqin Zhang , Yunfei Li , Huimin Ma , Xiong Luo

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

Value-based algorithms are a cornerstone of off-policy reinforcement learning due to their simplicity and training stability. However, their use has traditionally been restricted to discrete action spaces, as they rely on estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Yigit Korkmaz , Urvi Bhuwania , Ayush Jain , Erdem Bıyık

In complex environments with high dimension, training a reinforcement learning (RL) model from scratch often suffers from lengthy and tedious collection of agent-environment interactions. Instead, leveraging expert demonstration to guide RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Zhaorun Chen , Binhao Chen , Shenghan Xie , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Junping Zhang

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Pretraining with expert demonstrations have been found useful in speeding up the training process of deep reinforcement learning algorithms since less online simulation data is required. Some people use supervised learning to speed up the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Xiaoqin Zhang , Huimin Ma

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux