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Actor-critic methods have achieved significant success in many challenging applications. However, its finite-time convergence is still poorly understood in the most practical single-timescale form. Existing works on analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Xuyang Chen , Lin Zhao

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by their need for an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Denis Steckelmacher , Hélène Plisnier , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

Many modern approaches to offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) utilize behavior regularization, typically augmenting a model-free actor critic algorithm with a penalty measuring divergence of the policy from the offline data. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Jonathan Tompson , Rob Fergus , Ofir Nachum

While on-policy algorithms are known for their stability, they often demand a substantial number of samples. In contrast, off-policy algorithms, which leverage past experiences, are considered sample-efficient but tend to exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Jianfei Ma

Deep actor-critic algorithms have reached a level where they influence everyday life. They are a driving force behind continual improvement of large language models through user feedback. However, their deployment in physical systems is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Bahareh Tasdighi , Manuel Haussmann , Yi-Shan Wu , Andres R. Masegosa , Melih Kandemir

Asymmetric actor-critic methods are widely used in partially observable reinforcement learning, but typically assume full state observability to condition the critic during training, which is often unrealistic in practice. We introduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Daniel Ebi , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Klemens Böhm

Emphatic algorithms are temporal-difference learning algorithms that change their effective state distribution by selectively emphasizing and de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. Recent works by Sutton, Mahmood and White…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-07 A. Rupam Mahmood , Huizhen Yu , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

We discuss the problem of decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in this work. In our setting, the global state, action, and reward are assumed to be fully observable, while the local policy is protected as privacy by each…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia

Risk-aware Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms like SAC and TD3 were shown empirically to outperform their risk-neutral counterparts in a variety of continuous-action tasks. However, the theoretical basis for the pessimistic objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan

This paper presents the Relaxed Continuous-Time Actor-critic (RCTAC) algorithm, a method for finding the nearly optimal policy for nonlinear continuous-time (CT) systems with known dynamics and infinite horizon, such as the path-tracking…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-31 Jingliang Duan , Jie Li , Qiang Ge , Shengbo Eben Li , Monimoy Bujarbaruah , Fei Ma , Dezhao Zhang

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

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

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL)-based backstepping control strategy to achieve fixed time consensus in nonlinear multi-agent systems with strict feedback dynamics. Agents exchange only output information with their…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-23 Aria Delshad , Maryam Babazadeh

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these methods in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Kamil Ciosek , Quan Vuong , Robert Loftin , Katja Hofmann

Recent advances of gradient temporal-difference methods allow to learn off-policy multiple value functions in parallel with- out sacrificing convergence guarantees or computational efficiency. This opens up new possibilities for sound…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-22 Anna Harutyunyan , Tim Brys , Peter Vrancx , Ann Nowe

We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Huizhen Yu

Precision and Recall are fundamental metrics in machine learning tasks where both accurate predictions and comprehensive coverage are essential, such as in multi-label learning, language generation, medical studies, and recommender systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Lee Cohen , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran , Han Shao

Accurate value estimates are important for off-policy reinforcement learning. Algorithms based on temporal difference learning typically are prone to an over- or underestimation bias building up over time. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Nicolai Dorka , Tim Welschehold , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

Multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods recently witness vigorous progress. However, there is a significant performance discrepancy between MAPG methods and state-of-the-art multi-agent value-based approaches. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Yihan Wang , Beining Han , Tonghan Wang , Heng Dong , Chongjie Zhang

Experience replay (ER) used in (deep) reinforcement learning is considered to be applicable only to off-policy algorithms. However, there have been some cases in which ER has been applied for on-policy algorithms, suggesting that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Taisuke Kobayashi