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Related papers: Soft Options Critic

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We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

Background: Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient-based reinforcement learning algorithms utilize Actor-Critic architectures, where both networks are typically trained using identical batches of replayed transitions. However, the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Mehmet Efe Lorasdagi , Dogan Can Cicek , Furkan Burak Mutlu , Suleyman Serdar Kozat

Optimizing dynamic risk with stochastic policies is challenging in both policy updates and value learning. The former typically requires transition perturbation, while the latter may rely on model-based approaches. To address these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yudong Luo , Erick Delage

Wastewater treatment plants face unique challenges for process control due to their complex dynamics, slow time constants, and stochastic delays in observations and actions. These characteristics make conventional control methods, such as…

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) generate a large number of false alerts which makes it difficult to inspect true positives. Hence, alert prioritization plays a crucial role in deciding which alerts to investigate from an enormous number…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Lalitha Chavali , Tanay Gupta , Paresh Saxena

Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Uğurcan Özalp

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning--based framework for cryptocurrency portfolio management using the Soft Actor--Critic (SAC) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithms. Traditional portfolio optimization methods…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-11-27 Kamal Paykan

The recently proposed option-critic architecture Bacon et al. provide a stochastic policy gradient approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning. Specifically, they provide a way to estimate the gradient of the expected discounted return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Saket Tiwari , Philip S. Thomas

Efficient utilization of the replay buffer plays a significant role in the off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms used for model-free control policy synthesis for complex dynamical systems. We propose a method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Nikhil Kumar Singh , Indranil Saha

Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-12-04 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Aram Galstyan , Ali E. Abbas , Zbigniew R. Struzik

In our work we implicitly suggest that it is a misconception to think that humans learn fast. The learning process takes time. Babies start learning to move in the restricted fluid environment of the womb. Children are often limited by…

We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Honghao Wei , Xiyue Peng , Arnob Ghosh , Xin Liu

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

The two-time scale nature of SAC, which is an actor-critic algorithm, is characterised by the fact that the critic estimate has not converged for the actor at any given time, but since the critic learns faster than the actor, it ensures…

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Ziheng Wang , Justin Sirignano

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

High level declarative constraints provide a powerful (and popular) way to define and construct control policies; however, most synthesis algorithms do not support specifying the degree of randomness (unpredictability) of the resulting…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Marcell Vazquez-Chanlatte , Sebastian Junges , Daniel J. Fremont , Sanjit Seshia

In this work, we consider the problem of autonomously discovering behavioral abstractions, or options, for reinforcement learning agents. We propose an algorithm that focuses on the termination condition, as opposed to -- as is common --…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-27 Anna Harutyunyan , Will Dabney , Diana Borsa , Nicolas Heess , Remi Munos , Doina Precup