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Explicit exploration in the action space was assumed to be indispensable for online policy gradient methods to avoid a drastic degradation in sample complexity, for solving general reinforcement learning problems over finite state and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan

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

This paper considers the problem of designing optimal algorithms for reinforcement learning in two-player zero-sum games. We focus on self-play algorithms which learn the optimal policy by playing against itself without any direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Yu Bai , Chi Jin , Tiancheng Yu

Identification and analysis of symmetrical patterns in the natural world have led to significant discoveries across various scientific fields, such as the formulation of gravitational laws in physics and advancements in the study of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Dingyang Chen , Qi Zhang

We introduce a reinforcement learning method for a class of non-Markov systems; our approach extends the actor-critic framework given by Rose et al. [New J. Phys. 23 013013 (2021)] for obtaining scaled cumulant generating functions…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-03-09 Venkata D. Pamulaparthy , Rosemary J. Harris

We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Sumitra Ganesh , Alec Koppel

Federated reinforcement learning (RL) enables collaborative decision making of multiple distributed agents without sharing local data trajectories. In this work, we consider a multi-task setting, in which each agent has its own private…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Tong Yang , Shicong Cen , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Online imitation learning is the problem of how best to mimic expert demonstrations, given access to the environment or an accurate simulator. Prior work has shown that in the infinite sample regime, exact moment matching achieves value…

Reinforcement learning provides a mathematical framework for learning-based control, whose success largely depends on the amount of data it can utilize. The efficient utilization of historical trajectories obtained from previous policies is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

Two-time-scale Stochastic Approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm with applications in reinforcement learning and optimization. Prior finite time analysis of such algorithms has focused on fixed point iterations with mappings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Siddharth Chandak , Shaan Ul Haque , Nicholas Bambos

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

This work proposes a universal and adaptive second-order method for minimizing second-order smooth, convex functions. Our algorithm achieves $O(\sigma / \sqrt{T})$ convergence when the oracle feedback is stochastic with variance $\sigma^2$,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-13 Kimon Antonakopoulos , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yaakov Engel , Michal Valko

Trajectory Optimization (TO) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are powerful and complementary tools to solve optimal control problems. On the one hand, TO can efficiently compute locally-optimal solutions, but it tends to get stuck in local…

Two-timescale Stochastic Approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their iterates have two parts that are updated using distinct stepsizes. In this work, we develop a novel recipe for their finite sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-06 Gal Dalal , Balazs Szorenyi , Gugan Thoppe , Shie Mannor

Learning stationary policies in infinite-horizon general-sum Markov games (MGs) remains a fundamental open problem in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). While stationary strategies are preferred for their practicality, computing…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yizhou Zhang , Eric Mazumdar

In this paper, we present a probability one convergence proof, under suitable conditions, of a certain class of actor-critic algorithms for finding approximate solutions to entropy-regularized MDPs using the machinery of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Wesley Suttle , Zhuoran Yang , Kaiqing Zhang , Ji Liu

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to the curse of dimensionality induced by the non-stationarity of optimal policies. In this work,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-26 Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhargav Ganguly , Vaneet Aggarwal