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We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel

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

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

This work extends an existing virtual multi-agent platform called RoboSumo to create TripleSumo -- a platform for investigating multi-agent cooperative behaviors in continuous action spaces, with physical contact in an adversarial…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Ni Wang , Gautham P. Das , Alan G. Millard

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-16 Guillaume Bouchard , Théo Trouillon , Julien Perez , Adrien Gaidon

Independent on-policy policy gradient algorithms are widely used for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in cooperative and no-conflict games, but they are known to converge sub-optimally when each agent's individual policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Nicholas E. Corrado , Josiah P. Hanna

Multi-agent reinforcement learning, despite its popularity and empirical success, faces significant scalability challenges in large-population dynamic games. Graphon mean field games (GMFGs) offer a principled framework for approximating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Philipp Plank , Yufei Zhang

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm is one of the most well-known reinforcement learning methods. However, this method is inefficient and unstable in practical applications. On the other hand, the bias and variance of the Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Shuai Han , Wenbo Zhou , Shuai Lü , Jiayu Yu

Imitation learning has proven to be useful for many real-world problems, but approaches such as behavioral cloning suffer from data mismatch and compounding error issues. One attempt to address these limitations is the DAgger algorithm,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Michael Kelly , Chelsea Sidrane , Katherine Driggs-Campbell , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Wesley Suttle , Zhuoran Yang , Kaiqing Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Tamer Basar , Ji Liu

Competitive multi-agent reinforcement learning in imperfect-information games requires agents to act under partial observability and against adversarial opponents, necessitating stochastic policies. While self-play reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Zhiyuan Fan , Gabriele Farina

We present a generative optimization approach for learning game-playing agents, where policies are represented as Python programs and refined using large language models (LLMs). Our method treats decision-making policies as self-evolving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhiyi Kuang , Ryan Rong , YuCheng Yuan , Allen Nie

Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Matteo Papini , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Policy gradient methods have become a staple of any single-agent reinforcement learning toolbox, due to their combination of desirable properties: iterate convergence, efficient use of stochastic trajectory feedback, and theoretically-sound…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Mingyang Liu , Gabriele Farina , Asuman Ozdaglar

We obtain global, non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for independent learning algorithms in competitive reinforcement learning settings with two agents (i.e., zero-sum stochastic games). We consider an episodic setting where in each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Constantinos Daskalakis , Dylan J. Foster , Noah Golowich

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

This work focuses on the entropy-regularized independent natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this work, agents are assumed to have access to an oracle with exact policy evaluation and seek to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Youbang Sun , Tao Liu , P. R. Kumar , Shahin Shahrampour

Improving the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning has been a long-standing research problem. In this work, we aim to reduce the sample complexity of existing policy gradient methods. We propose a novel policy gradient algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

Learning in games provides a powerful framework to design control policies for self-interested agents that may be coupled through their dynamics, costs, or constraints. We consider the case where the dynamics of the coupled system can be…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-18 Mostafa M. Shibl , Vijay Gupta

Policy gradient (PG) algorithms have been widely used in reinforcement learning (RL). However, PG algorithms rely on exploiting the value function being learned with the first-order update locally, which results in limited sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Hao Sun , Ziping Xu , Yuhang Song , Meng Fang , Jiechao Xiong , Bo Dai , Bolei Zhou