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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

We introduce a hybrid CPU/GPU version of the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm, currently the state-of-the-art method in reinforcement learning for various gaming tasks. We analyze its computational traits and concentrate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-08 Mohammad Babaeizadeh , Iuri Frosio , Stephen Tyree , Jason Clemons , Jan Kautz

\Ac{MPC} and \ac{RL} are two powerful control strategies with, arguably, complementary advantages. In this work, we show how actor-critic \ac{RL} techniques can be leveraged to improve the performance of \ac{MPC}. The \ac{RL} critic is used…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-07 Rudolf Reiter , Andrea Ghezzi , Katrin Baumgärtner , Jasper Hoffmann , Robert D. McAllister , Moritz Diehl

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an area of machine learning figuring out how agents take actions in an unknown environment to maximize its rewards. Unlike classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which agent has full knowledge of its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Yangxin Zhong , Jiajie He , Lingjie Kong

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms are known to be data inefficient. One reason is that a DRL agent learns both the feature and the policy tabula rasa. Integrating prior knowledge into DRL algorithms is one way to improve learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Gabriel V. de la Cruz , Yunshu Du , Matthew E. Taylor

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

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

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) is effective for sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty, it still fails to thrive in real-world systems where risk or safety is a binding constraint. In this paper, we formulate the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Debabrota Basu

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved great successes in recent years with the help of novel methods and higher compute power. However, there are still several challenges to be addressed such as convergence to locally optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Bilal Kartal , Pablo Hernandez-Leal , Matthew E. Taylor

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

Online reinforcement learning (RL) enhances policies through direct interactions with the environment, but faces challenges related to sample efficiency. In contrast, offline RL leverages extensive pre-collected data to learn policies, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Xuefeng Liu , Hung T. C. Le , Siyu Chen , Rick Stevens , Zhuoran Yang , Matthew R. Walter , Yuxin Chen

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those involving sparse rewards. While action chunking is a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, using RL to directly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Jiarui Yang , Bin Zhu , Jingjing Chen , Yu-Gang Jiang

Learning policies in an asynchronous parallel way is essential to the numerous successes of RL for solving large-scale problems. However, their convergence performance is still not rigorously evaluated. To this end, we adopt the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-04 Xingyu Sha , Feiran Zhao , Keyou You

Federated reinforcement learning (FRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling multiple agents to collaborate and learn a shared policy adaptable across heterogeneous environments. Among the various reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Ye Zhu , Xiaowen Gong

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques have drawn great attention in many challenging tasks, but their performance deteriorates dramatically when applied to real-world problems. Various methods, such as domain randomization, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Wangyang Yue , Yuan Zhou , Xiaochuan Zhang , Yuchen Hua , Zhiyuan Wang , Guang Kou

We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for deep reinforcement learning that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization of deep neural network controllers. We present asynchronous variants of four standard…

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