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Related papers: The Actor-Advisor: Policy Gradient With Off-Policy…

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We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) is effective for sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty, it still fails to thrive in real-world systems where risk or safety is a binding constraint. In this paper, we formulate the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Debabrota Basu

Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Erinc Merdivan , Sten Hanke , Matthieu Geist

We present an algorithm for learning an approximate action-value soft Q-function in the relative entropy regularised reinforcement learning setting, for which an optimal improved policy can be recovered in closed form. We use recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Jonas Degrave , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller

In this paper, we establish the global optimality and convergence rate of an off-policy actor critic algorithm in the tabular setting without using density ratio to correct the discrepancy between the state distribution of the behavior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Shangtong Zhang , Remi Tachet , Romain Laroche

As an important algorithm in deep reinforcement learning, advantage actor critic (A2C) has been widely succeeded in both discrete and continuous control tasks with raw pixel inputs, but its sample efficiency still needs to improve more. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Yuan Wang , Chunyuan Zhang , Tianzong Yu , Meng Ma

We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Honghao Wei , Xiyue Peng , Arnob Ghosh , Xin Liu

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…

For continuous action spaces, actor-critic methods are widely used in online reinforcement learning (RL). However, unlike RL algorithms for discrete actions, which generally model the optimal value function using the Bellman optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Motoki Omura , Kazuki Ota , Takayuki Osa , Yusuke Mukuta , Tatsuya Harada

Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Max Qiushi Lin , Reza Asad , Kevin Tan , Haque Ishfaq , Csaba Szepesvari , Sharan Vaswani

Effective offline RL methods require properly handling out-of-distribution actions. Implicit Q-learning (IQL) addresses this by training a Q-function using only dataset actions through a modified Bellman backup. However, it is unclear which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Philippe Hansen-Estruch , Ilya Kostrikov , Michael Janner , Jakub Grudzien Kuba , Sergey Levine

Quantum computing offers efficient encapsulation of high-dimensional states. In this work, we propose a novel quantum reinforcement learning approach that combines the Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm with variational quantum circuits by…

We introduce a class of variational actor-critic algorithms based on a variational formulation over both the value function and the policy. The objective function of the variational formulation consists of two parts: one for maximizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuhua Zhu , Lexing Ying

Deploying reinforcement learning in the real world remains challenging due to sample inefficiency, sparse rewards, and noisy visual observations. Prior work leverages demonstrations and human feedback to improve learning efficiency and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Xiefeng Wu , Mingyu Hu , Shu Zhang

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based algorithm to jointly train (1) a trajectory planner and (2) a tracking controller in a layered control architecture. Our algorithm arises naturally from a rewrite of the underlying optimal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-18 Fengjun Yang , Nikolai Matni

Traditional continuous deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ deterministic or unimodal Gaussian actors, which cannot express complex multimodal decision distributions. This limitation can hinder their performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ziqi Wang , Jiashun Liu , Ling Pan

The option framework has shown great promise by automatically extracting temporally-extended sub-tasks from a long-horizon task. Methods have been proposed for concurrently learning low-level intra-option policies and high-level option…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Chenghao Li , Xiaoteng Ma , Chongjie Zhang , Jun Yang , Li Xia , Qianchuan Zhao

Intelligent robots provide a new insight into efficiency improvement in industrial and service scenarios to replace human labor. However, these scenarios include dense and dynamic obstacles that make motion planning of robots challenging.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Chengmin Zhou , Bingding Huang , Pasi Fränti

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods designed to handle adversarial input observations have received significant attention, motivated by RL's inherent vulnerabilities. While existing approaches have demonstrated reasonable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kosuke Nakanishi , Akihiro Kubo , Yuji Yasui , Shin Ishii