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Adopting reasonable strategies is challenging but crucial for an intelligent agent with limited resources working in hazardous, unstructured, and dynamic environments to improve the system's utility, decrease the overall cost, and increase…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Qin Yang , Ramviyas Parasuraman

In the domain of continuous control, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) demonstrates promising results. However, the dependence of DRL on deep neural networks (DNNs) results in the demand for extensive data and increased computational cost.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Shiron Thalagala , Pak Kin Wong , Xiaozheng Wang , Tianang Sun

Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Sajad Khodadadian , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg , Siva Theja Maguluri

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

Deploying reinforcement learning in the real world remains challenging due to sample inefficiency, sparse rewards, and noisy visual observations. Prior work leverages demonstrations and human feedback to improve learning efficiency and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Xiefeng Wu , Mingyu Hu , Shu Zhang

In reinforcement learning, off-policy actor-critic methods like DDPG and TD3 use deterministic policy gradients: the Q-function is learned from environment data, while the actor maximizes it via gradient ascent. We observe that in complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Ayush Jain , Norio Kosaka , Xinhu Li , Kyung-Min Kim , Erdem Bıyık , Joseph J. Lim

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…

To make efficient use of limited spectral resources, we in this work propose a deep actor-critic reinforcement learning based framework for dynamic multichannel access. We consider both a single-user case and a scenario in which multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-23 Chen Zhong , Ziyang Lu , M. Cenk Gursoy , Senem Velipasalar

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Continuous control of non-stationary environments is a major challenge for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The time-dependency of the state transition dynamics aggravates the notorious stability problems of model-free deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Abdullah Akgül , Gulcin Baykal , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

While the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning (RL) framework -- often touted for its exploration and robustness capabilities -- is usually motivated from a probabilistic perspective, the use of deep probabilistic models has not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Dinghuai Zhang , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio , Qinqing Zheng , Amy Zhang , Ricky T. Q. Chen

Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) RL maximizes a combination of the original task reward and an entropy reward. It is believed that the regularization imposed by entropy, on both policy improvement and policy evaluation, together contributes to good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Haonan Yu , Haichao Zhang , Wei Xu

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Robust reinforcement learning aims to produce policies that have strong guarantees even in the face of environments/transition models whose parameters have strong uncertainty. Existing work uses value-based methods and the usual primitive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Shie Mannor

Robotic manipulation remains challenging for reinforcement learning due to contact-rich dynamics, long horizons, and training instability. Although off-policy actor-critic algorithms such as SAC and TD3 perform well in simulation, they…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yu Zhang , Karl Mason

Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Olivier Jeunen

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Prediction+optimization is a common real-world paradigm where we have to predict problem parameters before solving the optimization problem. However, the criteria by which the prediction model is trained are often inconsistent with the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Kai Yan , Jie Yan , Chuan Luo , Liting Chen , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang

This paper proposes an off-policy risk-sensitive reinforcement learning based control framework for stabilization of a continuous-time nonlinear system that subjects to additive disturbances, input saturation, and state constraints. By…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-21 Cong Li , Qingchen Liu , Zhehua Zhou , Martin Buss , Fangzhou Liu

Being able to fall safely is a necessary motor skill for humanoids performing highly dynamic tasks, such as running and jumping. We propose a new method to learn a policy that minimizes the maximal impulse during the fall. The optimization…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Visak CV Kumar , Sehoon Ha , C Karen Liu