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Related papers: Multi-Preference Actor Critic

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We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC perspective to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Alessio Russo , Aldo Pacchiano

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), interactions with the environment are limited due to cost or feasibility. This presents a challenge to traditional RL algorithms since the max-return objective involves an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Ofir Nachum , Bo Dai , Ilya Kostrikov , Yinlam Chow , Lihong Li , Dale Schuurmans

Actor critic methods with sparse rewards in model-based deep reinforcement learning typically require a deterministic binary reward function that reflects only two possible outcomes: if, for each step, the goal has been achieved or not. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Juan Vargas , Lazar Andjelic , Amir Barati Farimani

Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 David M. Bossens , Atsushi Nitanda

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

This paper proposes the Cooperative Soft Actor Critic (CSAC) method of enabling consecutive reinforcement learning agents to cooperatively solve a long time horizon multi-stage task. This method is achieved by modifying the policy of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Jordan Erskine , Chris Lehnert

This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Jinchi Chen , Jie Feng , Weiguo Gao , Ke Wei

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…

This paper studies a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based actor critic (AC) reinforcement learning (RL) technique to control a linear discrete-time system with a quadratic control cost while ensuring a constraint on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-22 Arunava Naha , Subhrakanti Dey

We present the first provably convergent two-timescale off-policy actor-critic algorithm (COF-PAC) with function approximation. Key to COF-PAC is the introduction of a new critic, the emphasis critic, which is trained via Gradient Emphasis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Shangtong Zhang , Bo Liu , Hengshuai Yao , Shimon Whiteson

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

Constrained multiagent reinforcement learning (C-MARL) is gaining importance as MARL algorithms find new applications in real-world systems ranging from energy systems to drone swarms. Most C-MARL algorithms use a primal-dual approach to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-28 Daniel Tabas , Ahmed S. Zamzam , Baosen Zhang

Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution, where training is done in a centralized offline fashion, has become a popular solution paradigm in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. Many such methods take the form of actor-critic with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xueguang Lyu , Andrea Baisero , Yuchen Xiao , Christopher Amato

We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Avik Kar , Siddharth Chandak , Rahul Singh , Soumitra Sinhahajari , Eric Moulines , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Nicholas Bambos

Balancing reward and safety in constrained reinforcement learning remains challenging due to poor generalization from sharp value minima and inadequate handling of heavy-tailed risk distribution. We introduce Safe Langevin Soft Actor-Critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mahesh Keswani , Samyak Jain , Raunak P. Bhattacharyya

Reinforcement learning (RL) in discrete action space is ubiquitous in real-world applications, but its complexity grows exponentially with the action-space dimension, making it challenging to apply existing on-policy gradient based deep RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-24 Yuguang Yue , Yunhao Tang , Mingzhang Yin , Mingyuan Zhou

We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sanjeev Manivannan , Shuban V

This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Linda Bushnell , Radha Poovendran

Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat