Related papers: Improving Sample Complexity Bounds for (Natural) A…

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…

Several recent works have focused on carrying out non-asymptotic convergence analyses for AC algorithms. Recently, a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm has been presented for the discounted cost setting in the look-up table case where the…

We consider the problem of designing sample efficient learning algorithms for infinite horizon discounted reward Markov Decision Process. Specifically, we propose the Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (ANPG) algorithm that utilizes an…

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…

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms show remarkable performance in complex simulated environments. A key element of SAC networks is entropy regularization, which prevents the SAC actor from optimizing against fine grained features,…

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…

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…

We propose a new policy iteration theory as an important extension of soft policy iteration and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), one of the most efficient model free algorithms for deep reinforcement learning. Supported by the new theory, arbitrary…

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…

Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…

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…

Many reinforcement learning methods achieve great success in practice but lack theoretical foundation. In this paper, we study the convergence analysis on the problem of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The global linear convergence…

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…

Reinforcement learning with multiple, potentially conflicting objectives is pervasive in real-world applications, while this problem remains theoretically under-explored. This paper tackles the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL)…

Sample efficiency is a central property of effective deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Recent work has improved this through added complexity, such as larger models, exotic network architectures, and more complex algorithms, which are…

In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…

In current model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, stability criteria based on sampling methods are commonly utilized to guide policy optimization. However, these criteria only guarantee the infinite-time convergence of the…

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is widely used in practical applications and is now one of the most relevant off-policy online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The technique of n-step returns is known to increase the convergence…

Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…

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…