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In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…
We develop a new policy gradient and actor-critic algorithm for solving mean-field control problems within a continuous time reinforcement learning setting. Our approach leverages a gradient-based representation of the value function,…
We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…
Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…
We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient…
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…
We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…
We study online control for continuous-time linear systems with finite sampling rates, where the objective is to design an online procedure that learns under non-stochastic noise and performs comparably to a fixed optimal linear controller.…
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…
We investigate the neural Actor Critic algorithm using shallow neural networks for both the Actor and Critic models. The focus of this work is twofold: first, to compare the convergence properties of the network outputs under various…
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…
We establish the convergence of the deep actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm presented in [Angiuli et al., 2023a] in the setting of continuous state and action spaces with an infinite discrete-time horizon. This algorithm provides…
The wide popularity of short videos on social media poses new opportunities and challenges to optimize recommender systems on the video-sharing platforms. Users sequentially interact with the system and provide complex and multi-faceted…
This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL)-based backstepping control strategy to achieve fixed time consensus in nonlinear multi-agent systems with strict feedback dynamics. Agents exchange only output information with their…
We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…
As an important algorithm in deep reinforcement learning, advantage actor critic (A2C) has been widely succeeded in both discrete and continuous control tasks with raw pixel inputs, but its sample efficiency still needs to improve more. In…
Off-Policy Actor-Critic (Off-PAC) methods have proven successful in a variety of continuous control tasks. Normally, the critic's action-value function is updated using temporal-difference, and the critic in turn provides a loss for the…
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…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has attracted much research attention recently. However, unlike its single-agent counterpart, many theoretical and algorithmic aspects of MARL have not been well-understood. In this paper, we study…
This paper introduces the Active-Importance-Sampling Actor-Critic (AISAC) algorithm, an extension of the Actor-Critic framework for reducing variance in policy gradient estimation. AISAC optimizes the behavior policy to minimize gradient…