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Deterministic-policy actor-critic algorithms for continuous control improve the actor by plugging its actions into the critic and ascending the action-value gradient, which is obtained by chaining the actor's Jacobian matrix with the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Pierluca D'Oro , Wojciech Jaśkowski

Regularization is a core component of recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Mirror Descent Value Iteration (MDVI) uses both Kullback-Leibler divergence and entropy as regularizers in its value and policy updates. Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Ryo Iwaki

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

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…

We propose a novel independent and payoff-based learning framework for stochastic games that is model-free, game-agnostic, and gradient-free. The learning dynamics follow a best-response-type actor-critic architecture, where agents update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ahmed Said Donmez , Yuksel Arslantas , Muhammed O. Sayin

In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Weiya Ren

The option-critic architecture (Bacon, Harb, and Precup 2017) and several variants have successfully demonstrated the use of the options framework proposed by Sutton et al (Sutton, Precup, and Singh1999) to scale learning and planning in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Elita Lobo , Scott Jordan

This paper introduces Team-Attention-Actor-Critic (TAAC), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to enhance multi-agent collaboration in cooperative environments. TAAC employs a Centralized Training/Centralized Execution scheme…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Hugo Garrido-Lestache Belinchon , Jeremy Kedziora

Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution, where agents are trained offline using centralized information but execute in a decentralized manner online, has gained popularity in the multi-agent reinforcement learning community. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Xueguang Lyu , Yuchen Xiao , Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang

We present temporally abstract actor-critic (TAAC), a simple but effective off-policy RL algorithm that incorporates closed-loop temporal abstraction into the actor-critic framework. TAAC adds a second-stage binary policy to choose between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Haonan Yu , Wei Xu , Haichao Zhang

Policy Dual Averaging (PDA) offers a principled Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) framework that more naturally admits value function approximation than standard PMD, enabling the use of approximate advantage (or Q-) functions while retaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Ji Gao , Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan , Zhaohui Tong

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, multiple agents learn simultaneously while interacting with a common environment and each other. Since the agents adapt their policies during learning, not only the behavior of a single agent becomes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Yuan Tian , Klaus-Rudolf Kladny , Qin Wang , Zhiwu Huang , Olga Fink

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

Decision-making for engineering systems can be efficiently formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) or a Partially Observable MDP (POMDP). Typical MDP and POMDP solution procedures utilize offline knowledge about the environment and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-11-07 C. P. Andriotis , K. G. Papakonstantinou

The wide popularity of short videos on social media poses new opportunities and challenges to optimize recommender systems on the video-sharing platforms. Users sequentially interact with the system and provide complex and multi-faceted…

In this paper we propose a hybrid architecture of actor-critic algorithms for reinforcement learning in parameterized action space, which consists of multiple parallel sub-actor networks to decompose the structured action space into simpler…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Zhou Fan , Rui Su , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

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

Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Yue Wu , Weitong Zhang , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

This paper studies fully decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, where each agent solely observes the states, its local actions, and the shared rewards. The inability to access other agents' actions often leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Chao Li , Bingkun Bao , Yang Gao