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This paper addresses a critical gap in Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MOMARL) by introducing the first dedicated inner-loop actor-critic framework for continuous state and action spaces: Multi-Objective Multi-Agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Adam Callaghan , Karl Mason , Patrick Mannion

\Ac{MPC} and \ac{RL} are two powerful control strategies with, arguably, complementary advantages. In this work, we show how actor-critic \ac{RL} techniques can be leveraged to improve the performance of \ac{MPC}. The \ac{RL} critic is used…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-07 Rudolf Reiter , Andrea Ghezzi , Katrin Baumgärtner , Jasper Hoffmann , Robert D. McAllister , Moritz Diehl

To obtain better value estimation in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel algorithm based on the double actor-critic framework with temporal difference error-driven regularization, abbreviated as TDDR. TDDR employs double actors, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Haohui Chen , Zhiyong Chen , Aoxiang Liu , Wentuo Fang

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with learning a rewarding policy by executing another policy that gathers samples of experience. While the former policy (i.e. target policy) is rewarding but in-expressive (in most cases,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Anji Liu , Yitao Liang , Guy Van den Broeck

We present an actor-critic framework for MDPs where the objective is the variance-adjusted expected return. Our critic uses linear function approximation, and we extend the concept of compatible features to the variance-adjusted setting. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-10-15 Aviv Tamar , Shie Mannor

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia , Jiaqi Yan

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Navdeep Kumar , Priyank Agrawal , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

Multi-step learning applies lookahead over multiple time steps and has proved valuable in policy evaluation settings. However, in the optimal control case, the impact of multi-step learning has been relatively limited despite a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Yunhao Tang , Tadashi Kozuno , Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Rémi Munos , Bernardo Ávila Pires , Michal Valko

Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Reda Ouhamma , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Philippe Preux

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

Synchronizing decisions across multiple agents in realistic settings is problematic since it requires agents to wait for other agents to terminate and communicate about termination reliably. Ideally, agents should learn and execute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Yuchen Xiao , Weihao Tan , Christopher Amato

We consider the dynamic multichannel access problem, which can be formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We first propose a model-free actor-critic deep reinforcement learning based framework to explore the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Chen Zhong , Ziyang Lu , M. Cenk Gursoy , Senem Velipasalar

This paper presents a new method --- adversarial advantage actor-critic (Adversarial A2C), which significantly improves the efficiency of dialogue policy learning in task-completion dialogue systems. Inspired by generative adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-02-09 Baolin Peng , Xiujun Li , Jianfeng Gao , Jingjing Liu , Yun-Nung Chen , Kam-Fai Wong

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani

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…

Deterministic policy gradient algorithms for continuous control suffer from value estimation biases that degrade performance. While double critics reduce such biases, the exploration potential of double actors remains underexplored.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Haohui Chen , Zhiyong Chen , Aoxiang Liu , Wentuo Fang

Background: Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient-based reinforcement learning algorithms utilize Actor-Critic architectures, where both networks are typically trained using identical batches of replayed transitions. However, the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Mehmet Efe Lorasdagi , Dogan Can Cicek , Furkan Burak Mutlu , Suleyman Serdar Kozat