Related papers: The Actor-Advisor: Policy Gradient With Off-Policy…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
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…
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…
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…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…
We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…
We show that offline actor-critic reinforcement learning can scale to large models - such as transformers - and follows similar scaling laws as supervised learning. We find that offline actor-critic algorithms can outperform strong,…
To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…
We develop an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for learning an optimal policy from a training set composed of data from multiple individuals. This algorithm is developed with a view towards its use in mobile health.
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…
Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…
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…
In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…
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…
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…
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…
Policy gradient methods have become popular in multi-agent reinforcement learning, but they suffer from high variance due to the presence of environmental stochasticity and exploring agents (i.e., non-stationarity), which is potentially…
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…
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…
Large language model (LLM) agents -- LLMs that dynamically interact with an environment over long horizons -- have become an increasingly important area of research, enabling automation in complex tasks involving tool-use, web browsing, and…