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In this work, we propose Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic (BAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm. BAC mathematically formulates the behavior of the policy through autoencoders by providing an accurate estimation of how frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Ammar Fayad , Majd Ibrahim

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin

We investigate the combination of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms with uniform large-scale experience replay and propose solutions for two challenges: (a) efficient actor-critic learning with experience replay (b) stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Simon Schmitt , Matteo Hessel , Karen Simonyan

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yaakov Engel , Michal Valko

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj

The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Extracting relevant information from a stream of high-dimensional observations is a central challenge for deep reinforcement learning agents. Actor-critic algorithms add further complexity to this challenge, as it is often unclear whether…

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Junfeng Wen , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Dale Schuurmans

Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Thomas Spooner , Rahul Savani

In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-28 Weijian Li , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

In this work, we propose a multi-agent actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to accelerate the multi-level Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling algorithms. The policies (actors) of the agents are used to generate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Eric Chung , Yalchin Efendiev , Wing Tat Leung , Sai-Mang Pun , Zecheng Zhang

Deterministic policy gradient algorithms are foundational for actor-critic methods in controlling continuous systems, yet they often encounter inaccuracies due to their dependence on the derivative of the critic's value estimates with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Baturay Saglam , Dionysis Kalogerias

We explore deep reinforcement learning methods for multi-agent domains. We begin by analyzing the difficulty of traditional algorithms in the multi-agent case: Q-learning is challenged by an inherent non-stationarity of the environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Ryan Lowe , Yi Wu , Aviv Tamar , Jean Harb , Pieter Abbeel , Igor Mordatch

Being able to seamlessly generalize across different tasks is fundamental for robots to act in our world. However, learning representations that generalize quickly to new scenarios is still an open research problem in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Sarah Bechtle , Ludovic Righetti , Franziska Meier

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

On error of value function inevitably causes an overestimation phenomenon and has a negative impact on the convergence of the algorithms. To mitigate the negative effects of the approximation error, we propose Error Controlled Actor-critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Xingen Gao , Fei Chao , Changle Zhou , Zhen Ge , Chih-Min Lin , Longzhi Yang , Xiang Chang , Changjing Shang

Training a game-playing reinforcement learning agent requires multiple interactions with the environment. Ignorant random exploration may cause a waste of time and resources. It's essential to alleviate such waste. As discussed in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Tairan Huang , Xu Li , Hao Li , Mingming Sun , Ping Li