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This paper proposes a reinforcement learning--based framework for cryptocurrency portfolio management using the Soft Actor--Critic (SAC) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithms. Traditional portfolio optimization methods…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-11-27 Kamal Paykan

In this work we present a new agent architecture, called Reactor, which combines multiple algorithmic and architectural contributions to produce an agent with higher sample-efficiency than Prioritized Dueling DQN (Wang et al., 2016) and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Audrunas Gruslys , Will Dabney , Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Bilal Piot , Marc Bellemare , Remi Munos

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Samin Yeasar Arnob , Doina Precup

Deep reinforcement learning methods have shown great performance on many challenging cooperative multi-agent tasks. Two main promising research directions are multi-agent value function decomposition and multi-agent policy gradients. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Yuan Pu , Shaochen Wang , Rui Yang , Xin Yao , Bin Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

In the domain of continuous control, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) demonstrates promising results. However, the dependence of DRL on deep neural networks (DNNs) results in the demand for extensive data and increased computational cost.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Shiron Thalagala , Pak Kin Wong , Xiaozheng Wang , Tianang Sun

Reinforcement learning algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, typically requiring significant manual effort to identify hyperparameters that perform well on a new domain. In this paper, we take a step towards…

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

Off-Policy Actor-Critic (Off-PAC) methods have proven successful in a variety of continuous control tasks. Normally, the critic's action-value function is updated using temporal-difference, and the critic in turn provides a loss for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Wei Zhou , Yiying Li , Yongxin Yang , Huaimin Wang , Timothy M. Hospedales

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Luca Grillotti , Maxence Faldor , Borja G. León , Antoine Cully

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL) evolve along distinct paths but converge in the design of Dyna-Q [1]. However, modern RL methods still struggle with effective transferability across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Quanxi Zhou , Wencan Mao , Manabu Tsukada , John C. S. Lui , Yusheng Ji

Actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have recently achieved prominent success in tackling various challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems, particularly complex control tasks with high-dimensional continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Gang Chen , Victoria Huang

A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Eric Graves , Ehsan Imani , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

We introduce D2AC, a new model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to train expressive diffusion policies online effectively. At its core is a policy improvement objective that avoids the high variance of typical policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lunjun Zhang , Shuo Han , Hanrui Lyu , Bradly C Stadie

Actor-critic (AC) is a powerful method for learning an optimal policy in reinforcement learning, where the critic uses algorithms, e.g., temporal difference (TD) learning with function approximation, to evaluate the current policy and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yudan Wang , Yue Wang , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, growing demand variability, and evolving grid control strategies, accurate and efficient load modeling has become a critical yet challenging task. Traditional methods, such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-11 Ding Lin , Han Guo , Jianhui Wang , Meng Yue , Tianqiao Zhao

We study the robustness of deep reinforcement learning algorithms against distribution shifts within contextual multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problems from the operations research domain. In this context, risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Tobias Enders , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

It has long been recognized that multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces significant scalability issues due to the fact that the size of the state and action spaces are exponentially large in the number of agents. In this paper, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-12 Guannan Qu , Yiheng Lin , Adam Wierman , Na Li

This work extends an established critic match loss landscape visualization method from online to off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to reveal the optimization geometry behind critic learning. Off-policy RL differs from stepwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jingyi Liu , Jian Guo , Eberhard Gill