Related papers: Variance Reduction in Actor Critic Methods (ACM)
We investigate the discounting mismatch in actor-critic algorithm implementations from a representation learning perspective. Theoretically, actor-critic algorithms usually have discounting for both actor and critic, i.e., there is a…
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…
Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…
Cooperative problems under continuous control have always been the focus of multi-agent reinforcement learning. Existing algorithms suffer from the problem of uneven learning degree with the increase of the number of agents. In this paper,…
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,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing tasks, yet they encounter challenges in complex decision-making scenarios that require long-term reasoning and alignment with high-level…
This paper proposes a novel approach for Asset-Liability Management (ALM) by employing continuous-time Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a linear-quadratic (LQ) formulation that incorporates both interim and terminal objectives. We develop a…
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…
In this paper, we introduce an actor-critic algorithm called Deep Value Model Predictive Control (DMPC), which combines model-based trajectory optimization with value function estimation. The DMPC actor is a Model Predictive Control (MPC)…
Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of…
Ensembles are ubiquitous in off-policy actor-critic learning, yet their efficacy depends critically on how they are aggregated. Current methods typically rely on static rules or task-specific hyperparameters to balance overestimation bias…
Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. The main players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients of neural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to show…
While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has great potential for acquiring the optimal action in complex environments such as games and robot control. However, it is difficult to analyze the decision-making of the agent, i.e., the reasons it…
While transformer models have been highly successful, they are computationally inefficient. We observe that for each layer, the full width of the layer may be needed only for a small subset of tokens inside a batch and that the "effective"…
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…
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…
We use Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) for implementing an AI agent in the controllers that optimize flow of traffic across a single intersection and then extend it to multiple intersections by considering a multi-agent setting.…
In cooperative stochastic games multiple agents work towards learning joint optimal actions in an unknown environment to achieve a common goal. In many real-world applications, however, constraints are often imposed on the actions that can…