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Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to challenging continuous control domains. However, poor sample efficiency prevents these methods from being widely used in real-world domains. This paper introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Sicen Li , Qinyun Tang , Yiming Pang , Xinmeng Ma , Gang Wang

We present a training framework for neural abstractive summarization based on actor-critic approaches from reinforcement learning. In the traditional neural network based methods, the objective is only to maximize the likelihood of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-16 Piji Li , Lidong Bing , Wai Lam

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have significant potential for dialogue policy optimisation. However, they suffer from a poor performance in the early stages of learning. This is especially problematic for on-line learning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-06 Pei-Hao Su , Pawel Budzianowski , Stefan Ultes , Milica Gasic , Steve Young

Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-13 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan

In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies. We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Scott Fujimoto , Herke van Hoof , David Meger

Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Albert Wilcox , Ashwin Balakrishna , Jules Dedieu , Wyame Benslimane , Daniel S. Brown , Ken Goldberg

Being able to seamlessly generalize across different tasks is fundamental for robots to act in our world. However, learning representations that generalize quickly to new scenarios is still an open research problem in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Sarah Bechtle , Ludovic Righetti , Franziska Meier

Actor-critic methods can achieve incredible performance on difficult reinforcement learning problems, but they are also prone to instability. This is partly due to the interaction between the actor and critic during learning, e.g., an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Simone Parisi , Voot Tangkaratt , Jan Peters , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

Experience replay is a core ingredient of modern deep reinforcement learning, yet its benefits in policy optimization are poorly understood beyond empirical heuristics. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for experience replay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Ehsan Imani , Eric Graves , Martha White

In this paper, we propose the first method to modify the prosodic features of a given speech signal using actor-critic reinforcement learning strategy. Our approach uses a Bayesian framework to identify contiguous segments of importance…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-06 Ravi Shankar , Archana Venkataraman

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have successfully been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. One dominant component of recent deep reinforcement learning algorithms is the target network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Lin Shao , Yifan You , Mengyuan Yan , Qingyun Sun , Jeannette Bohg

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Yuan Wang , Chunyuan Zhang , Tianzong Yu , Meng Ma

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Hang Wang , Sen Lin , Junshan Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yudong Luo , Erick Delage

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Trajectory Optimization (TO) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are powerful and complementary tools to solve optimal control problems. On the one hand, TO can efficiently compute locally-optimal solutions, but it tends to get stuck in local…

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou