Related papers: Variance Reduction in Actor Critic Methods (ACM)
We propose Q-learning with Adjoint Matching (QAM), a novel TD-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that tackles a long-standing challenge in continuous-action RL: efficient optimization of an expressive diffusion or flow-matching…
Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…
In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…
In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…
In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…
Warm-Start reinforcement learning (RL), aided by a prior policy obtained from offline training, is emerging as a promising RL approach for practical applications. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that the performance of Warm-Start…
Since the objective functions of reinforcement learning problems are typically highly nonconvex, it is desirable that policy gradient, the most popular algorithm, escapes saddle points and arrives at second-order stationary points. Existing…
Decentralized (PO)MDPs provide an expressive framework for sequential decision making in a multiagent system. Given their computational complexity, recent research has focused on tractable yet practical subclasses of Dec-POMDPs. We address…
Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms, which aim to learn a model of the environment to make decisions, are more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts. The sample efficiency of model-based approaches relies on whether…
In this work, we consider the problem of computing optimal actions for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in a co-operative setting, where the objective is to optimize a common goal. However, in many real-life applications, in addition to…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…
Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…
We propose a novel actor-critic algorithm with guaranteed convergence to an optimal policy for a discounted reward Markov decision process. The actor incorporates a descent direction that is motivated by the solution of a certain non-linear…
The extremal dependence structure of a regularly varying $d$-dimensional random vector can be described by its angular measure. The standard nonparametric estimator of this measure is the empirical measure of the observed angles of the $k$…
In value-based deep reinforcement learning methods, approximation of value functions induces overestimation bias and leads to suboptimal policies. We show that in deep actor-critic methods that aim to overcome the overestimation bias, if…
Arbitrary varying channels (AVC) are used to model communication settings in which a channel state may vary arbitrarily over time. Their primary objective is to circumvent statistical assumptions on channel variation. Traditional studies on…
Most of the real-time implementations of the stabilizing optimal control actions suffer from the necessity to provide high computational effort. This paper presents a cutting-edge approach for real-time evaluation of linear-quadratic model…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies from fixed datasets without online interactions, but suffers from distribution shift, causing inaccurate evaluation and overestimation of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing…
ATARI is a suite of video games used by reinforcement learning (RL) researchers to test the effectiveness of the learning algorithm. Receiving only the raw pixels and the game score, the agent learns to develop sophisticated strategies,…
Long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks pose a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning, since single-step TD learning suffers from bootstrapping error accumulation across successive Bellman updates. Actor-critic methods with action…