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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 gradient methods with actor-critic schemes demonstrate tremendous empirical successes, especially when the actors and critics are parameterized by neural networks. However, it remains less clear whether such "neural" policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Lingxiao Wang , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Wesley Suttle , Zhuoran Yang , Kaiqing Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Tamer Basar , Ji Liu

Actor-critic algorithms that make use of distributional policy evaluation have frequently been shown to outperform their non-distributional counterparts on many challenging control tasks. Examples of this behavior include the D4PG and DMPO…

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

Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Yasuhiro Fujita , Shin-ichi Maeda

We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

This paper focuses on distributed learning-based control of decentralized multi-agent systems where the agents' dynamics are modeled by Gaussian Processes (GPs). Two fundamental problems are considered: the optimal design of experiment for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-06 Viet-Anh Le , Truong X. Nghiem

We introduce the framework of performative control, where the policy chosen by the controller affects the underlying dynamics of the control system. This results in a sequence of policy-dependent system state data with policy-dependent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-31 Songfu Cai , Fei Han , Xuanyu Cao

Domain randomization is a simple, effective, and flexible scheme for obtaining robust feedback policies aimed at reducing the sim-to-real gap due to model mismatch. While domain randomization methods have yielded impressive demonstrations…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Alex Nguyen-Le , Nikolai Matni

Opponent modelling has proven effective in enhancing the decision-making of the controlled agent by constructing models of opponent agents. However, existing methods often rely on access to the observations and actions of opponents, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Jing Sun , Shuo Chen , Cong Zhang , Yining Ma , Jie Zhang

We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-01 Robert Denkert , Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yaakov Engel , Michal Valko

Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Carson Eisenach , Haichuan Yang , Ji Liu , Han Liu

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

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

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

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

We develop a new policy gradient and actor-critic algorithm for solving mean-field control problems within a continuous time reinforcement learning setting. Our approach leverages a gradient-based representation of the value function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-11 Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin

Many real-world multi-agent systems exhibit nonlinear dynamics and complex inter-agent interactions. As these systems increase in scale, the main challenges arise from achieving scalability and handling nonconvexity. To address these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-22 Taehyun Yoon , Augustinos D. Saravanos , Evangelos A. Theodorou