Related papers: Variance Reduction in Actor Critic Methods (ACM)
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
As an important algorithm in deep reinforcement learning, advantage actor critic (A2C) has been widely succeeded in both discrete and continuous control tasks with raw pixel inputs, but its sample efficiency still needs to improve more. In…
Actor-critic (AC) is a powerful method for learning an optimal policy in reinforcement learning, where the critic uses algorithms, e.g., temporal difference (TD) learning with function approximation, to evaluate the current policy and the…
Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…
We present temporally abstract actor-critic (TAAC), a simple but effective off-policy RL algorithm that incorporates closed-loop temporal abstraction into the actor-critic framework. TAAC adds a second-stage binary policy to choose between…
Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…
Conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, typically focused on estimating or maximizing expected returns, face challenges when refining offline pretrained models with online experiences. This paper introduces Generative Actor…
A key open challenge in agile quadrotor flight is how to combine the flexibility and task-level generality of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with the structure and online replanning capabilities of model predictive control (MPC),…
Cooperative multi-agent systems can be naturally used to model many real world problems, such as network packet routing and the coordination of autonomous vehicles. There is a great need for new reinforcement learning methods that can…
In this work we analyze Multi-Agent Advantage Actor-Critic (MA2C) a recently proposed multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that can be applied to adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) problems. To evaluate its potential we compare…
Efficient job scheduling on data centers under heterogeneous complexity is crucial but challenging since it involves the allocation of multi-dimensional resources over time and space. To adapt the complex computing environment in data…
Several recent works have focused on carrying out non-asymptotic convergence analyses for AC algorithms. Recently, a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm has been presented for the discounted cost setting in the look-up table case where the…
Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…
The control variates method is a classical variance reduction technique for Monte Carlo estimators that exploits correlated auxiliary variables without introducing bias. In many applications, the quantity of interest can be expressed as a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful tool for solving complex decision-making problems, but its lack of transparency and interpretability has been a major challenge in domains where decisions have significant real-world consequences.…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are a cornerstone of reinforcement learning (RL) but offer limited interpretability. Current explainable RL methods seldom use state attributions to assist training. Rather, they treat all state features equally,…
Quantum computing has a superior advantage in tackling specific problems, such as integer factorization and Simon's problem. For more general tasks in machine learning, by applying variational quantum circuits, more and more quantum…
By using an parametric value function to replace the Monte-Carlo rollouts for value estimation, the actor-critic (AC) algorithms can reduce the variance of stochastic policy gradient so that to improve the convergence rate. While existing…
This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…
The actor-critic RL is widely used in various robotic control tasks. By viewing the actor-critic RL from the perspective of variational inference (VI), the policy network is trained to obtain the approximate posterior of actions given the…