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We introduce a sequence-conditioned critic for Soft Actor--Critic (SAC) that models trajectory context with a lightweight Transformer and trains on aggregated $N$-step targets. Unlike prior approaches that (i) score state--action pairs in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Dong Tian , Onur Celik , Gerhard Neumann

To obtain better value estimation in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel algorithm based on the double actor-critic framework with temporal difference error-driven regularization, abbreviated as TDDR. TDDR employs double actors, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Haohui Chen , Zhiyong Chen , Aoxiang Liu , Wentuo Fang

We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Sumitra Ganesh , Alec Koppel

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Samuel Neumann , Sungsu Lim , Ajin Joseph , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

The exploration mechanism used by a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent plays a key role in determining its sample efficiency. Thus, improving over random exploration is crucial to solve long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Andrey Kurenkov , Ajay Mandlekar , Roberto Martin-Martin , Silvio Savarese , Animesh Garg

We propose Adversarially Trained Actor Critic (ATAC), a new model-free algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) under insufficient data coverage, based on the concept of relative pessimism. ATAC is designed as a two-player…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Ching-An Cheng , Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

Motivated by the recent applications of game-theoretical learning techniques to the design of distributed control systems, we study a class of control problems that can be formulated as potential games with continuous action sets, and we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-12-03 Steven Perkins , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , David S. Leslie

Quantum computing offers efficient encapsulation of high-dimensional states. In this work, we propose a novel quantum reinforcement learning approach that combines the Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm with variational quantum circuits by…

While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Reza Asad , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Wesley A. Suttle , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhrij Patel , Brian M. Sadler , Alec Koppel , Dinesh Manocha

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Debidatta Dwibedi , Sergey Levine , Jonathan Tompson

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Tejaram Sangadi , L. A. Prashanth , Krishna Jagannathan

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms show remarkable performance in complex simulated environments. A key element of SAC networks is entropy regularization, which prevents the SAC actor from optimizing against fine grained features,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Miguel Campo , Zhengxing Chen , Luke Kung , Kittipat Virochsiri , Jianyu Wang

This work focuses on equilibrium selection in no-conflict multi-agent games, where we specifically study the problem of selecting a Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium among several existing equilibria. It has been shown that many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Filippos Christianos , Georgios Papoudakis , Stefano V. Albrecht

Reinforcement learning has attracted great attention recently, especially policy gradient algorithms, which have been demonstrated on challenging decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we propose an active multi-step TD algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Gang Chen , Dingcheng Li , Ran Xu

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

Reinforcement learning with multiple, potentially conflicting objectives is pervasive in real-world applications, while this problem remains theoretically under-explored. This paper tackles the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Tianchen Zhou , FNU Hairi , Haibo Yang , Jia Liu , Tian Tong , Fan Yang , Michinari Momma , Yan Gao

In many robotic applications, some aspects of the system dynamics can be modeled accurately while others are difficult to obtain or model. We present a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for continuous state and action spaces that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Tomoki Nishi , Prashant Doshi , Michael R. James , Danil Prokhorov

We investigate the discounting mismatch in actor-critic algorithm implementations from a representation learning perspective. Theoretically, actor-critic algorithms usually have discounting for both actor and critic, i.e., there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Shangtong Zhang , Romain Laroche , Harm van Seijen , Shimon Whiteson , Remi Tachet des Combes