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Multi-agent reinforcement learning has made substantial empirical progresses in solving games with a large number of players. However, theoretically, the best known sample complexity for finding a Nash equilibrium in general-sum games…
This work extends an established critic match loss landscape visualization method from online to off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to reveal the optimization geometry behind critic learning. Off-policy RL differs from stepwise…
We study the convergence of the actor-critic algorithm with nonlinear function approximation under a nonconvex-nonconcave primal-dual formulation. Stochastic gradient descent ascent is applied with an adaptive proximal term for robust…
We consider a discounted cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) policy optimization problem, in which an agent seeks to maximize a discounted cumulative reward subject to a number of constraints on discounted cumulative utilities.…
Many existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods employ stochastic gradient iteration on the back end, whose stability hinges upon a hypothesis that the data-generating process mixes exponentially fast with a rate parameter that appears in…
This paper proposes the Cooperative Soft Actor Critic (CSAC) method of enabling consecutive reinforcement learning agents to cooperatively solve a long time horizon multi-stage task. This method is achieved by modifying the policy of each…
Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…
Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning. By combining off-policy updates with an actor-critic formulation, SAC achieves…
Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…
Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…
A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many domains, such as video games, recommendation systems and robotic control tasks. In continuous control tasks, widely used policies with Gaussian distributions results…
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…
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…
Actors and critics in actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms are functionally separate, yet they often use the same network architectures. This case study explores the performance impact of network sizes when considering actor and…
Off-policy reinforcement learning enables near-optimal policy from suboptimal experience, thereby provisions opportunity for artificial intelligence applications in healthcare. Previous works have mainly framed patient-clinician…
Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy…
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…
After presenting Actor Critic Methods (ACM), we show ACM are control variate estimators. Using the projection theorem, we prove that the Q and Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) methods are optimal in the sense of the $L^2$ norm for the control…
This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…