Related papers: A Finite Time Analysis of Two Time-Scale Actor Cri…
As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…
Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…
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…
The actor-critic (AC) algorithm is a popular method to find an optimal policy in reinforcement learning. In the infinite horizon scenario, the finite-sample convergence rate for the AC and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms has been…
Actor-critic (AC) is a powerful method for learning an optimal policy in reinforcement learning, where the critic uses algorithms, e.g., temporal difference (TD) learning with function approximation, to evaluate the current policy and the…
Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…
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…
Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…
Actor-Critic based approaches were among the first to address reinforcement learning in a general setting. Recently, these algorithms have gained renewed interest due to their generality, good convergence properties, and possible biological…
Decentralized Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms have been widely utilized for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and have achieved remarkable success. Apart from its empirical success, the theoretical convergence property of decentralized…
Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…
Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…
We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…
We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…
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…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…
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…
Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…