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In this paper, we study the continuous-time multi-asset mean-variance (MV) portfolio selection using a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, specifically the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm, in the time-varying financial market. A family…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-13 Yu Li , Yuhan Wu , Shuhua Zhang

To improve the sample efficiency of policy-gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms, we propose implicit distributional actor-critic (IDAC) that consists of a distributional critic, built on two deep generator networks (DGNs), and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Yuguang Yue , Zhendong Wang , Mingyuan Zhou

We introduce D2AC, a new model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to train expressive diffusion policies online effectively. At its core is a policy improvement objective that avoids the high variance of typical policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lunjun Zhang , Shuo Han , Hanrui Lyu , Bradly C Stadie

The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm with a Gaussian policy has become a mainstream implementation for realizing the Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) objective, which incorporates entropy maximization to encourage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Xiaoyi Dong , Jian Cheng , Xi Sheryl Zhang

This work extends an established critic match loss landscape visualization method from online to off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to reveal the optimization geometry behind critic learning. Off-policy RL differs from stepwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jingyi Liu , Jian Guo , Eberhard Gill

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

Deep reinforcement learning has made significant progress in robotic manipulation tasks and it works well in the ideal disturbance-free environment. However, in a real-world environment, both internal and external disturbances are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Pingcheng Jian , Chao Yang , Di Guo , Huaping Liu , Fuchun Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable performance in numerous sequential decision making and control tasks. However, a common problem is that learned nearly optimal policy always overfits to the training environment and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Yangang Ren , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yang Guan , Qi Sun

State-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable performance in continuous control tasks, yet their computational complexity is often incompatible with the constraints of resource-limited hardware, due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Riccardo De Monte , Matteo Cederle , Gian Antonio Susto

Reinforcement learning has been proven to be highly effective in handling complex control tasks. Traditional methods typically use unimodal distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, to model the output of value distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Tong Liu , Yinuo Wang , Xujie Song , Wenjun Zou , Liangfa Chen , Likun Wang , Bin Shuai , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

Recent advances in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) have created unprecedented opportunities for intelligent automation, where a machine can autonomously learn an optimal policy for performing a given task. However, current deep RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Zohreh Raziei , Mohsen Moghaddam

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

Learning expressive stochastic policies instead of deterministic ones has been proposed to achieve better stability, sample complexity, and robustness. Notably, in Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL), the policy is modeled as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Safa Messaoud , Billel Mokeddem , Zhenghai Xue , Linsey Pang , Bo An , Haipeng Chen , Sanjay Chawla

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alex X. Lee , Anusha Nagabandi , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

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

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

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

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

The volatility fitting is one of the core problems in the equity derivatives business. Through a set of deterministic rules, the degrees of freedom in the implied volatility surface encoding (parametrization, density, diffusion) are…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-10-16 Emmanuel Gnabeyeu , Omar Karkar , Imad Idboufous

Traditional continuous deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ deterministic or unimodal Gaussian actors, which cannot express complex multimodal decision distributions. This limitation can hinder their performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ziqi Wang , Jiashun Liu , Ling Pan