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Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms, which aim to learn a model of the environment to make decisions, are more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts. The sample efficiency of model-based approaches relies on whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Zhihai Wang , Jie Wang , Qi Zhou , Bin Li , Houqiang Li

Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding reinforcement learning in discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) by deriving tight sample complexity bounds. However, in many real-world applications, an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-12 Christoph Dann , Emma Brunskill

Adam is one of the most influential adaptive stochastic algorithms for training deep neural networks, which has been pointed out to be divergent even in the simple convex setting via a few simple counterexamples. Many attempts, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Congliang Chen , Li Shen , Fangyu Zou , Wei Liu

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those involving sparse rewards. While action chunking is a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, using RL to directly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Jiarui Yang , Bin Zhu , Jingjing Chen , Yu-Gang Jiang

Various acceleration approaches for Policy Gradient (PG) have been analyzed within the realm of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of the widely used momentum-based acceleration method on PG remains largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yen-Ju Chen , Nai-Chieh Huang , Ching-Pei Lee , Ping-Chun Hsieh

This paper presents an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) variant, referred to as the AC-ACG method, for solving nonconvex smooth composite minimization problems. As opposed to well-known ACG variants that are either based on a known…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-30 Jiaming Liang , Renato D. C. Monteiro

Learning-based methods have enabled robots to acquire bio-inspired movements with increasing levels of naturalness and adaptability. Among these, Imitation Learning (IL) has proven effective in transferring complex motion patterns from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nayari Marie Lessa , Melya Boukheddimi , Frank Kirchner

Temporal-difference learning with gradient correction (TDC) is a two time-scale algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. This algorithm was initially proposed with linear function approximation, and was later extended to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yi Zhou

Long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks pose a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning, since single-step TD learning suffers from bootstrapping error accumulation across successive Bellman updates. Actor-critic methods with action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Qian Chen , Junqiao Zhao , Hongtu Zhou , Hang Yu , Yanping Zhao , Chen Ye , Guang Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) actor-critic algorithms enable autonomous learning but often require a large number of environment interactions, which limits their applicability in robotics. Leveraging expert data can reduce the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Andreas Kernbach , Amr Elsheikh , Nicolas Grupp , René Nagel , Marco F. Huber

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani

Cooperative problems under continuous control have always been the focus of multi-agent reinforcement learning. Existing algorithms suffer from the problem of uneven learning degree with the increase of the number of agents. In this paper,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Kai Liu , Yuyang Zhao , Gang Wang , Bei Peng

We identify a fundamental problem in policy gradient-based methods in continuous control. As policy gradient methods require the agent's underlying probability distribution, they limit policy representation to parametric distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Chen Tessler , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES), which aims to learn the optimal policy using only sample returns, is a simple and natural algorithm in reinforcement learning which has been shown to converge under various conditions. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Suei-Wen Chen , Keith Ross , Pierre Youssef

We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Dongsheng Ding , Kaiqing Zhang , Jiali Duan , Tamer Başar , Mihailo R. Jovanović

The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, a state-of-the-art method in maximum entropy reinforcement learning, traditionally relies on minimizing reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence for policy updates. However, this approach leads to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yixian Zhang , Huaze Tang , Changxu Wei , Wenbo Ding

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

Large-scale networked systems, such as traffic, power, and wireless grids, challenge reinforcement-learning agents with both scale and environment shifts. To address these challenges, we propose GSAC (Generalizable and Scalable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Hao Liang , Shuqing Shi , Yudi Zhang , Biwei Huang , Yali Du

Actor-critic methods constitute a central paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), coupling policy evaluation with policy improvement. While effective across many domains, these methods rely on separate actor and critic networks, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha