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We introduce a reinforcement learning method for a class of non-Markov systems; our approach extends the actor-critic framework given by Rose et al. [New J. Phys. 23 013013 (2021)] for obtaining scaled cumulant generating functions…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-03-09 Venkata D. Pamulaparthy , Rosemary J. Harris

Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Simon Ramstedt , Yann Bouteiller , Giovanni Beltrame , Christopher Pal , Jonathan Binas

This paper addresses a critical gap in Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MOMARL) by introducing the first dedicated inner-loop actor-critic framework for continuous state and action spaces: Multi-Objective Multi-Agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Adam Callaghan , Karl Mason , Patrick Mannion

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, multiple agents learn simultaneously while interacting with a common environment and each other. Since the agents adapt their policies during learning, not only the behavior of a single agent becomes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Yuan Tian , Klaus-Rudolf Kladny , Qin Wang , Zhiwu Huang , Olga Fink

Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. The main players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients of neural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Recep Yusuf Bekci , Mehmet Gümüş

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Lukas P. Fröhlich , Maksym Lefarov , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Felix Berkenkamp

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Niao He , Lihong Li , Le Song

We present the first provably convergent two-timescale off-policy actor-critic algorithm (COF-PAC) with function approximation. Key to COF-PAC is the introduction of a new critic, the emphasis critic, which is trained via Gradient Emphasis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Shangtong Zhang , Bo Liu , Hengshuai Yao , Shimon Whiteson

Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance. We provide evidence consistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Nathan Samuel de Lara , Florian Shkurti

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj

Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-26 Hao Liu , Yihao Feng , Yi Mao , Dengyong Zhou , Jian Peng , Qiang Liu

Constructing agents with planning capabilities has long been one of the main challenges in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Tree-based planning methods from AlphaGo to Muzero have enjoyed huge success in discrete domains, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-16 Jiajun Fan , He Ba , Xian Guo , Jianye Hao

We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Navdeep Kumar , Priyank Agrawal , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

A key challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) lies in designing learning signals that effectively promote coordination among agents. Designing such signals requires estimating how one agent's current action affects its…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Haohan Yu , Jinmiao Cong , Shengzhi Wang , Lu Wang , Chanjuan Liu

Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

Cooperative multi-agent problems often require coordination between agents, which can be achieved through a centralized policy that considers the global state. Multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods are commonly used to learn such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Xubo Lyu , Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi , Mo Chen , Yong Zhang

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

This paper proposes Self-Imitation Learning (SIL), a simple off-policy actor-critic algorithm that learns to reproduce the agent's past good decisions. This algorithm is designed to verify our hypothesis that exploiting past good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Junhyuk Oh , Yijie Guo , Satinder Singh , Honglak Lee

We study multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in a stochastic network of agents. The objective is to find localized policies that maximize the (discounted) global reward. In general, scalability is a challenge in this setting because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Yiheng Lin , Guannan Qu , Longbo Huang , Adam Wierman