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In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies. We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Scott Fujimoto , Herke van Hoof , David Meger

A common technique in reinforcement learning is to evaluate the value function from Monte Carlo simulations of a given policy, and use the estimated value function to obtain a new policy which is greedy with respect to the estimated value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Anna Winnicki , R. Srikant

Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

Policy optimization is a fundamental principle for designing reinforcement learning algorithms, and one example is the proximal policy optimization algorithm with a clipped surrogate objective (PPO-Clip), which has been popularly used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Nai-Chieh Huang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Kuo-Hao Ho , Hsuan-Yu Yao , Kai-Chun Hu , Liang-Chun Ouyang , I-Chen Wu

This study investigates cooperation evolution mechanisms in the spatial public goods game. A novel deep reinforcement learning framework, Proximal Policy Optimization with Adversarial Curriculum Transfer (PPO-ACT), is proposed to model…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Zhaoqilin Yang , Chanchan Li , Xin Wang , Youliang Tian

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Semih Cayci , Niao He , R. Srikant

Recent policy optimization approaches have achieved substantial empirical success by constructing surrogate optimization objectives. The Approximate Policy Iteration objective (Schulman et al., 2015a; Kakade and Langford, 2002) has become a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Marcin B. Tomczak , Sergio Valcarcel Macua , Enrique Munoz de Cote , Peter Vrancx

Recently, there are many trials to apply reinforcement learning in asset allocation for earning more stable profits. In this paper, we compare performance between several reinforcement learning algorithms - actor-only, actor-critic and PPO…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-01-16 Jiwon Kim , Moon-Ju Kang , KangHun Lee , HyungJun Moon , Bo-Kwan Jeon

We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning has long been a central challenge. Inspired by the multi-timescale encoding of the dopamine system in neurobiology, recent research has sought to introduce multiple discount factors into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jing Sun

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yudan Wang , Yue Wang , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sanjeev Manivannan , Shuban V

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-25 Esther Derman , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Shie Mannor

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Mo Zhou , Jianfeng Lu

We present Coordinated Proximal Policy Optimization (CoPPO), an algorithm that extends the original Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to the multi-agent setting. The key idea lies in the coordinated adaptation of step size during the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Zifan Wu , Chao Yu , Deheng Ye , Junge Zhang , Haiyin Piao , Hankz Hankui Zhuo

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning algorithms to search for better policies in the parameterized policy space. They do gradient search in the policy space and are known to converge very slowly. Nesterov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-26 K. Lakshmanan

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard for training legged robots, thanks to its robustness and scalability in massively parallel simulation environments like IsaacLab. However, its on-policy nature makes it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Gianluca Sabatini , Chenhao Li , Marco Hutter

Policy gradient methods with actor-critic schemes demonstrate tremendous empirical successes, especially when the actors and critics are parameterized by neural networks. However, it remains less clear whether such "neural" policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Lingxiao Wang , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang