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Related papers: Soft Options Critic

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Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Anand Kamat , Doina Precup

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhiwei Shang , Xinyi Yuan , Wenjun Huang , Yunduan Cui , Di Chen , Meixin Zhu

The options framework is a popular approach for building temporally extended actions in reinforcement learning. In particular, the option-critic architecture provides general purpose policy gradient theorems for learning actions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-07 Matthew Riemer , Ignacio Cases , Clemens Rosenbaum , Miao Liu , Gerald Tesauro

Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms show remarkable performance in complex simulated environments. A key element of SAC networks is entropy regularization, which prevents the SAC actor from optimizing against fine grained features,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Miguel Campo , Zhengxing Chen , Luke Kung , Kittipat Virochsiri , Jianyu Wang

Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jake Grigsby , Jin Yong Yoo , Yanjun Qi

We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Safwan Labbi , Paul Mangold , Daniil Tiapkin , Eric Moulines

The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Quantum computing has a superior advantage in tackling specific problems, such as integer factorization and Simon's problem. For more general tasks in machine learning, by applying variational quantum circuits, more and more quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-23 Qingfeng Lan

Building systems that autonomously create temporal abstractions from data is a key challenge in scaling learning and planning in reinforcement learning. One popular approach for addressing this challenge is the options framework (Sutton et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Matthew Riemer , Miao Liu , Gerald Tesauro

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

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

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is widely used in practical applications and is now one of the most relevant off-policy online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The technique of n-step returns is known to increase the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jakub Łyskawa , Jakub Lewandowski , Paweł Wawrzyński

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

Hyper-parameter optimization is a crucial problem in machine learning as it aims to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in any model. Great efforts have been made in this field, such as random search, grid search, Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Chaoyue Liu , Yulai Zhang

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning. By combining off-policy updates with an actor-critic formulation, SAC achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Che Wang , Keith Ross

Learning-based methods have enabled robots to acquire bio-inspired movements with increasing levels of naturalness and adaptability. Among these, Imitation Learning (IL) has proven effective in transferring complex motion patterns from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nayari Marie Lessa , Melya Boukheddimi , Frank Kirchner