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Related papers: TD-Regularized Actor-Critic Methods

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qinxun Bai , Yuxuan Han , Wei Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Taisuke Kobayashi

Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Philippe Preux , Matthieu Geist

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL)-based backstepping control strategy to achieve fixed time consensus in nonlinear multi-agent systems with strict feedback dynamics. Agents exchange only output information with their…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-23 Aria Delshad , Maryam Babazadeh

While there has been substantial success for solving continuous control with actor-critic methods, simpler critic-only methods such as Q-learning find limited application in the associated high-dimensional action spaces. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Tim Seyde , Peter Werner , Wilko Schwarting , Igor Gilitschenski , Martin Riedmiller , Daniela Rus , Markus Wulfmeier

Many reinforcement learning approaches rely on temporal-difference (TD) learning to learn a critic. However, TD-learning updates can be high variance. Here, we introduce a model-based RL framework, Taylor TD, which reduces this variance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Michele Garibbo , Maxime Robeyns , Laurence Aitchison

In this paper, we propose actor-director-critic, a new framework for deep reinforcement learning. Compared with the actor-critic framework, the director role is added, and action classification and action evaluation are applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Zongwei Liu , Yonghong Song , Yuanlin Zhang

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

Reinforcement learning is a general methodology of adaptive optimal control that has attracted much attention in various fields ranging from video game industry to robot manipulators. Despite its remarkable performance demonstrations, plain…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2022-06-14 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Ilya Osokin

A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Baturay Saglam , Furkan B. Mutlu , Dogan C. Cicek , Suleyman S. Kozat

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…

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these methods in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Kamil Ciosek , Quan Vuong , Robert Loftin , Katja Hofmann

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Safwan Labbi , Paul Mangold , Daniil Tiapkin , Eric Moulines

In decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, agents can aggregate information from one another to learn policies that maximize a team-average objective function. Despite the willingness to cooperate with others, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-27 Martin Figura , Yixuan Lin , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have successfully been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. One dominant component of recent deep reinforcement learning algorithms is the target network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Lin Shao , Yifan You , Mengyuan Yan , Qingyun Sun , Jeannette Bohg

Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Zhiyao Zhang , Myeung Suk Oh , FNU Hairi , Ziyue Luo , Alvaro Velasquez , Jia Liu

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, multiple agents learn simultaneously while interacting with a common environment and each other. Since the agents adapt their policies during learning, not only the behavior of a single agent becomes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Yuan Tian , Klaus-Rudolf Kladny , Qin Wang , Zhiwu Huang , Olga Fink

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang

Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution, where agents are trained offline using centralized information but execute in a decentralized manner online, has gained popularity in the multi-agent reinforcement learning community. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Xueguang Lyu , Yuchen Xiao , Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

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…