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Related papers: OPAC: Opportunistic Actor-Critic

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Robotic manipulation remains challenging for reinforcement learning due to contact-rich dynamics, long horizons, and training instability. Although off-policy actor-critic algorithms such as SAC and TD3 perform well in simulation, they…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yu Zhang , Karl Mason

Reinforcement Learning (RL), recognized as an efficient learning approach, has achieved remarkable success across multiple fields and applications, including gaming, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Classical single-agent reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Jingpu Yang , Helin Wang , Qirui Zhao , Zhecheng Shi , Zirui Song , Miao Fang

Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jake Grigsby , Jin Yong Yoo , Yanjun Qi

Control of batch processes is a difficult task due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and unsteady-state operating conditions within batch and batch-to-batch. It is expected that some of these challenges can be addressed by developing…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-20 Tanuja Joshi , Shikhar Makker , Hariprasad Kodamana , Harikumar Kandath

High-precision control tasks present substantial challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, frequently resulting in suboptimal performance attributed to network approximation inaccuracies and inadequate sample quality.These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Donghe Chen , Yubin Peng , Tengjie Zheng , Han Wang , Chaoran Qu , Lin Cheng

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which have proven their efficacy in diverse domains, especially in solving continuous control problems. Improvement of exploration (action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

In this paper, we propose actor-director-critic, a new framework for deep reinforcement learning. Compared with the actor-critic framework, the director role is added, and action classification and action evaluation are applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Zongwei Liu , Yonghong Song , Yuanlin Zhang

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

Conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, typically focused on estimating or maximizing expected returns, face challenges when refining offline pretrained models with online experiences. This paper introduces Generative Actor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Aoyang Qin , Deqian Kong , Wei Wang , Ying Nian Wu , Song-Chun Zhu , Sirui Xie

In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Harshat Kumar , Alec Koppel , Alejandro Ribeiro

Value-based algorithms are a cornerstone of off-policy reinforcement learning due to their simplicity and training stability. However, their use has traditionally been restricted to discrete action spaces, as they rely on estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Yigit Korkmaz , Urvi Bhuwania , Ayush Jain , Erdem Bıyık

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is widely used in practical applications and is now one of the most relevant off-policy online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The technique of n-step returns is known to increase the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jakub Łyskawa , Jakub Lewandowski , Paweł Wawrzyński

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianxiong Li , Honglei Yin

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

The two-time scale nature of SAC, which is an actor-critic algorithm, is characterised by the fact that the critic estimate has not converged for the actor at any given time, but since the critic learns faster than the actor, it ensures…

We present Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (DSAC), a distributional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that combines the strengths of distributional information of accumulated rewards and entropy-driven exploration from Soft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Xiaoteng Ma , Junyao Chen , Li Xia , Jun Yang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

Combining off-policy reinforcement learning methods with function approximators such as neural networks has been found to lead to overestimation of the value function and sub-optimal solutions. Improvement such as TD3 has been proposed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-09 Bo Zhou , Kejiao Li , Hongsheng Zeng , Fan Wang , Hao Tian

Adopting reasonable strategies is challenging but crucial for an intelligent agent with limited resources working in hazardous, unstructured, and dynamic environments to improve the system's utility, decrease the overall cost, and increase…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Qin Yang , Ramviyas Parasuraman