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To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a number of challenging problems. Despite these empirical successes, theoretical understanding of different algorithms is lacking, primarily due to the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Yuwei Luo , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mladen Kolar

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Deep Actor-Critic algorithms, which combine Actor-Critic with deep neural network (DNN), have been among the most prevalent reinforcement learning algorithms for decision-making problems in simulated environments. However, the existing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Kexuan Wang , An Liu , Baishuo Lin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

To make efficient use of limited spectral resources, we in this work propose a deep actor-critic reinforcement learning based framework for dynamic multichannel access. We consider both a single-user case and a scenario in which multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-23 Chen Zhong , Ziyang Lu , M. Cenk Gursoy , Senem Velipasalar

This paper studies the networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (NMARL) problem, where the objective of agents is to collaboratively maximize the discounted average cumulative rewards. Different from the existing methods that suffer…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Pengcheng Dai , Yuanqiu Mo , Wenwu Yu , Wei Ren

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We develop a parameterized Primal-Dual $\pi$ Learning method based on deep neural networks for Markov decision process with large state space and off-policy reinforcement learning. In contrast to the popular Q-learning and actor-critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-08 Woon Sang Cho , Mengdi Wang

In the context of Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), applying Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) faces challenges related to the update order of its actor and critic due to the aggregation step occurring between successive iterations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zhijie Xie , Shenghui Song

Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Prateek Jain , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Markus Holzleitner , Lukas Gruber , José Arjona-Medina , Johannes Brandstetter , Sepp Hochreiter

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia , Jiaqi Yan

Synchronizing decisions across multiple agents in realistic settings is problematic since it requires agents to wait for other agents to terminate and communicate about termination reliably. Ideally, agents should learn and execute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Yuchen Xiao , Weihao Tan , Christopher Amato

Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Thomas Spooner , Rahul Savani

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Both the optimal value function and the optimal policy can be used to model an optimal controller based on the duality established by the Bellman equation. Even with this duality, no parametric model has been able to output both policy and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-02 Jicheng Shi , Yingzhao Lian , Colin N. Jones

Regularization is one of the most important techniques in reinforcement learning algorithms. The well-known soft actor-critic algorithm is a special case of regularized policy iteration where the regularizer is chosen as Shannon entropy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Yunan Wang , Guojian Zhan , Jie Li , Shengbo Eben Li