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Related papers: OPAC: Opportunistic Actor-Critic

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Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Yue Wu , Weitong Zhang , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

The option-critic architecture (Bacon, Harb, and Precup 2017) and several variants have successfully demonstrated the use of the options framework proposed by Sutton et al (Sutton, Precup, and Singh1999) to scale learning and planning in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Elita Lobo , Scott Jordan

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

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 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…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Ehsan Imani , Eric Graves , Martha White

The advances in unsupervised object-centric representation learning have significantly improved its application to downstream tasks. Recent works highlight that disentangled object representations can aid policy learning in image-based,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Leonid Ugadiarov , Vitaliy Vorobyov , Aleksandr I. Panov

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies from fixed datasets without online interactions, but suffers from distribution shift, causing inaccurate evaluation and overestimation of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xuyang Chen , Keyu Yan , Wenhan Cao , Lin Zhao

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

Uncertainty quantification has been extensively used as a means to achieve efficient directed exploration in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, state-of-the-art methods for continuous actions still suffer from high sample complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Amarildo Likmeta , Matteo Sacco , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

We present the first provably convergent two-timescale off-policy actor-critic algorithm (COF-PAC) with function approximation. Key to COF-PAC is the introduction of a new critic, the emphasis critic, which is trained via Gradient Emphasis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Shangtong Zhang , Bo Liu , Hengshuai Yao , Shimon Whiteson

In offline reinforcement learning, it is necessary to manage out-of-distribution actions to prevent overestimation of value functions. One class of methods, the policy-regularized method, addresses this problem by constraining the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Linjiajie Fang , Ruoxue Liu , Jing Zhang , Wenjia Wang , Bing-Yi Jing

This paper proposes the Cooperative Soft Actor Critic (CSAC) method of enabling consecutive reinforcement learning agents to cooperatively solve a long time horizon multi-stage task. This method is achieved by modifying the policy of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Jordan Erskine , Chris Lehnert

Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) is an effective Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm for a wide range of tasks, such as Atari games and robot control. The agent learns policies and value function through trial-and-error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Zhaoyuan Gu , Zhenzhong Jia , Howie Choset

The effectiveness of credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with high-dimensional data is influenced by the success of representation learning via deep neural networks, and has implications for the sample efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Burcu Küçükoğlu , Sander Dalm , Marcel van Gerven

Learning-based methods have enabled robots to acquire bio-inspired movements with increasing levels of naturalness and adaptability. Among these, Imitation Learning (IL) has proven effective in transferring complex motion patterns from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nayari Marie Lessa , Melya Boukheddimi , Frank Kirchner

We present GuidedSAC, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that facilitates efficient exploration in vast state-action spaces. GuidedSAC leverages large language models (LLMs) as intelligent supervisors that provide action-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Hao Ma , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Huimu Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Yuan Wang , Chunyuan Zhang , Tianzong Yu , Meng Ma

We address the issue of estimation bias in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) by introducing solution mechanisms that include a new, twin TD-regularized actor-critic (TDR) method. It aims at reducing both over and under-estimation errors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Junmin Zhong , Ruofan Wu , Jennie Si