Related papers: Better Exploration with Optimistic Actor-Critic

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

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 exploration mechanism used by a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent plays a key role in determining its sample efficiency. Thus, improving over random exploration is crucial to solve long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards. We propose…

Actor-Critic models are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that have demonstrated effectiveness across various robot learning tasks. While considerable research has focused on improving training stability and…

This paper introduces the Active-Importance-Sampling Actor-Critic (AISAC) algorithm, an extension of the Actor-Critic framework for reducing variance in policy gradient estimation. AISAC optimizes the behavior policy to minimize gradient…

Bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision problems to maximize the cumulative reward. One potential application is mobile health, where the goal is to promote the user's health through personalized interventions based on user…

On error of value function inevitably causes an overestimation phenomenon and has a negative impact on the convergence of the algorithms. To mitigate the negative effects of the approximation error, we propose Error Controlled Actor-critic…

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…

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

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.…

In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

The ability to discover approximately optimal policies in domains with sparse rewards is crucial to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration…

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of…

In this paper, we present a new intrinsically motivated actor-critic algorithm for learning continuous motor skills directly from raw visual input. Our neural architecture is composed of a critic and an actor network. Both networks receive…

The oscillating performance of off-policy learning and persisting errors in the actor-critic (AC) setting call for algorithms that can conservatively learn to suit the stability-critical applications better. In this paper, we propose a…

Off-policy Actor-Critic algorithms have demonstrated phenomenal experimental performance but still require better explanations. To this end, we show its policy evaluation error on the distribution of transitions decomposes into: a Bellman…

We present a novel extension to the family of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithms. We argue that based on the Maximum Entropy Principle, discrete SAC can be further improved via additional statistical constraints derived from a surrogate…