English
Related papers

Related papers: Improving Exploration in Soft-Actor-Critic with No…

200 papers

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study the robustness of deep reinforcement learning algorithms against distribution shifts within contextual multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problems from the operations research domain. In this context, risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Tobias Enders , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer

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

Bus holding control is challenging due to stochastic traffic and passenger demand. While deep reinforcement learning (DRL) shows promise, standard actor-critic algorithms suffer from Q-value instability in volatile environments. A key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yifan Zhang , Liang Zheng

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods have performed well in an increasing numbering of high-dimensional visual decision making domains. Among all such visual decision making problems, those with discrete action spaces often tend to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Sahil Sharma , Aravind Suresh , Rahul Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is considered the state-of-the-art algorithm in continuous action space settings. It uses the maximum entropy framework for efficiency and stability, and applies a heuristic temperature Lagrange term to tune the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Yaosheng Xu , Dailin Hu , Litian Liang , Stephen McAleer , Pieter Abbeel , Roy Fox

Off-policy learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy ($\pi$) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause…

In graph-structured multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) adversarial tasks such as pursuit and confrontation, agents must coordinate under highly dynamic interactions, where sparse rewards hinder efficient policy learning. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Ruochuan Shi , Runyu Lu , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has experienced significant advancements in recent years and has been widely used in many fields. In DRL-based robotic policy learning, however, current de facto policy parameterization is still…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Diyuan Shi , Yiqi Tang , Zifeng Zhuang , Donglin Wang

We identify a fundamental problem in policy gradient-based methods in continuous control. As policy gradient methods require the agent's underlying probability distribution, they limit policy representation to parametric distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Chen Tessler , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

We propose Adversarially Trained Actor Critic (ATAC), a new model-free algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) under insufficient data coverage, based on the concept of relative pessimism. ATAC is designed as a two-player…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Ching-An Cheng , Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms, empowered by neural networks, have had significant empirical success in recent years. However, most of the existing theoretical support for AC algorithms focuses on the case of linear function approximations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Michael I. Jordan , Zhaoran Wang

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

Diffusion and flow matching policies offer expressive, multimodal action modeling, yet they are frequently unstable in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to intractable likelihoods and gradients propagating through long sampling chains.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Chubin Zhang , Zhenglin Wan , Feng Chen , Fuchao Yang , Lang Feng , Yaxin Zhou , Xingrui Yu , Yang You , Ivor Tsang , Bo An

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex decision-making and control tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Yinuo Wang , Likun Wang , Yuxuan Jiang , Wenjun Zou , Tong Liu , Xujie Song , Wenxuan Wang , Liming Xiao , Jiang Wu , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

Deep reinforcement learning has obtained significant breakthroughs in recent years. Most methods in deep-RL achieve good results via the maximization of the reward signal provided by the environment, typically in the form of discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Yubin Deng , Ke Yu , Dahua Lin , Xiaoou Tang , Chen Change Loy

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for addressing complex control problems, particularly those involving underactuated robotic systems. However, in some cases, policies may require refinement to achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Marco Calì , Alberto Sinigaglia , Niccolò Turcato , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

In this paper, we propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, called encoding distributional soft actor-critic (E-DSAC), for decision-making in autonomous driving. Unlike existing RL-based decision-making methods, E-DSAC is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Jingliang Duan , Yangang Ren , Fawang Zhang , Yang Guan , Dongjie Yu , Shengbo Eben Li , Bo Cheng , Lin Zhao

A reliable critic is central to on-policy actor-critic learning. But it becomes challenging to learn a reliable critic in a multi-agent sparse reward scenario due to two factors: 1) The joint action space grows exponentially with the number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Kinal Mehta , Anuj Mahajan , Pawan Kumar