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In this paper, we propose a max-min entropy framework for reinforcement learning (RL) to overcome the limitation of the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm implementing the maximum entropy RL in model-free sample-based learning. Whereas the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Rajarshi Banerjee , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Dhaval Parmar Udaybhai

The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qinxun Bai , Yuxuan Han , Wei Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

In this paper, sample-aware policy entropy regularization is proposed to enhance the conventional policy entropy regularization for better exploration. Exploiting the sample distribution obtainable from the replay buffer, the proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

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

Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Erinc Merdivan , Sten Hanke , Matthieu Geist

Discrete reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated exceptional performance in solving sequential decision tasks with discrete action spaces, such as Atari games. However, their effectiveness is hindered when applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yechen Zhang , Jian Sun , Gang Wang , Zhuo Li , Wei Chen

Soft Actor-Critic is a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous action settings that is not applicable to discrete action settings. Many important settings involve discrete actions, however, and so here we derive an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-21 Petros Christodoulou

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj

In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

Deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have emerged as the leading framework for reinforcement learning in continuous control domains. However, most of these algorithms suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially in environments with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Elita A. Lobo , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Tengyu Xu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Yingbin Liang

Mixture models are an expressive hypothesis class that can approximate a rich set of policies. However, using mixture policies in the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) framework is not straightforward. The entropy of a mixture model is not equal to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Nir Baram , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Having a perfect model to compute the optimal policy is often infeasible in reinforcement learning. It is important in high-stakes domains to quantify and manage risk induced by model uncertainties. Entropic risk measure is an exponential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Reazul Hasan Russel , Bahram Behzadian , Marek Petrik

Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Yuyang Zhang , Yang Hu , Bo Dai , Na Li

We aim to develop off-policy DRL algorithms that not only exceed state-of-the-art performance but are also simple and minimalistic. For standard continuous control benchmarks, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which employs entropy maximization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Che Wang , Yanqiu Wu , Quan Vuong , Keith Ross

Soft Q-learning has emerged as a versatile model-free method for entropy-regularised reinforcement learning, optimising for returns augmented with a penalty on the divergence from a reference policy. Despite its success, the multi-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Pranav Mahajan , Ben Seymour

Existing imitation learning methods mainly focus on making an agent effectively mimic a demonstrated behavior, but do not address the potential contradiction between the behavior style and the objective of a task. There is a general lack of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Mingxi Tan , Andong Tian , Ludovic Denoyer