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Related papers: Variance Reduction in Actor Critic Methods (ACM)

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We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for deep reinforcement learning that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization of deep neural network controllers. We present asynchronous variants of four standard…

Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) is a class of popular state-of-the-art Imitation Learning algorithms commonly used in robotics. In AIL, an artificial adversary's misclassification is used as a reward signal that is optimized by any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Ankur Deka , Changliu Liu , Katia Sycara

Synchronizing decisions across multiple agents in realistic settings is problematic since it requires agents to wait for other agents to terminate and communicate about termination reliably. Ideally, agents should learn and execute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Yuchen Xiao , Weihao Tan , Christopher Amato

Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Jonathan Lebensold , William Hamilton , Borja Balle , Doina Precup

Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance. We provide evidence consistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Nathan Samuel de Lara , Florian Shkurti

This paper introduces Team-Attention-Actor-Critic (TAAC), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to enhance multi-agent collaboration in cooperative environments. TAAC employs a Centralized Training/Centralized Execution scheme…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Hugo Garrido-Lestache Belinchon , Jeremy Kedziora

We introduce a variational algorithm to estimate the likelihood of a rare event within a nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulation through the evaluation of an optimal control force. Optimization of a control force within a chosen basis…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-01-14 Avishek Das , David T. Limmer

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

In this paper, we discuss the deterministic policy gradient using the Actor-Critic methods based on the linear compatible advantage function approximator, where the input spaces are continuous. When the policy is restricted by hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-07 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Hossein Nejatbakhsh Esfahani , Sebastien Gros

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, growing demand variability, and evolving grid control strategies, accurate and efficient load modeling has become a critical yet challenging task. Traditional methods, such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-11 Ding Lin , Han Guo , Jianhui Wang , Meng Yue , Tianqiao Zhao

Multi-model Monte Carlo methods, such as multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) and multifidelity Monte Carlo (MFMC), allow for efficient estimation of the expectation of a quantity of interest given a set of models of varying fidelities. Recently,…

Computation · Statistics 2020-12-07 Geoffrey F. Bomarito , Patrick E. Leser , James E. Warner , William P. Leser

Actor-critic algorithms have shown remarkable success in solving state-of-the-art decision-making problems. However, despite their empirical effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively unexplored, especially with neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Mudit Gaur , Amrit Singh Bedi , Di Wang , Vaneet Aggarwal

Overestimation is a fundamental characteristic of model-free reinforcement learning (MF-RL), arising from the principles of temporal difference learning and the approximation of the Q-function. To address this challenge, we propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Ukjo Hwang , Songnam Hong

Atomistic-to-Continuum (AtC) coupling methods are a novel means of computing the properties of a discrete crystal structure, such as those containing defects, that combine the accuracy of an atomistic (fully discrete) model with the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2013-09-25 Derek Olson , Pavel Bochev , Mitchell Luskin , Alexander V. Shapeev

Many practical applications of optimal control are subject to real-time computational constraints. When applying model predictive control (MPC) in these settings, respecting timing constraints is achieved by limiting the number of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-16 Anusha Srikanthan , Aren Karapetyan , Vijay Kumar , Nikolai Matni

Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Quoc-Vinh Lai-Dang , Dongsoo Har

Policy optimization methods remain a powerful workhorse in empirical Reinforcement Learning (RL), with a focus on neural policies that can easily reason over complex and continuous state and/or action spaces. Theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Alekh Agarwal , Lin F. Yang

Online reinforcement learning (RL) with complex function approximations such as transformers and deep neural networks plays a significant role in the modern practice of artificial intelligence. Despite its popularity and importance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Tong Yang , Bo Dai , Lin Xiao , Yuejie Chi

In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Safwan Labbi , Paul Mangold , Daniil Tiapkin , Eric Moulines

The trend is to implement intelligent agents capable of analyzing available information and utilize it efficiently. This work presents a number of reinforcement learning (RL) architectures; one of them is designed for intelligent agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Ala'eddin Masadeh , Zhengdao Wang , Ahmed E. Kamal