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Related papers: Adversarially Guided Actor-Critic

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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

We propose a fully distributed actor-critic algorithm approximated by deep neural networks, named \textit{Diff-DAC}, with application to single-task and to average multitask reinforcement learning (MRL). Each agent has access to data from…

Policy gradient methods have become popular in multi-agent reinforcement learning, but they suffer from high variance due to the presence of environmental stochasticity and exploring agents (i.e., non-stationarity), which is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Yuchen Xiao , Xueguang Lyu , Christopher Amato

Current imitation learning techniques are too restrictive because they require the agent and expert to share the same action space. However, oftentimes agents that act differently from the expert can solve the task just as good. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Nir Baram , Shie Mannor

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Goal Recognition aims to infer an agent's goal from a sequence of observations. Existing approaches often rely on manually engineered domains and discrete representations. Deep Recognition using Actor-Critic Optimization (DRACO) is a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-06 Ben Nageris , Felipe Meneguzzi , Reuth Mirsky

Accurate value estimates are important for off-policy reinforcement learning. Algorithms based on temporal difference learning typically are prone to an over- or underestimation bias building up over time. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Nicolai Dorka , Tim Welschehold , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

Deep reinforcement learning has learned to play many games well, but failed on others. To better characterize the modes and reasons of failure of deep reinforcement learners, we test the widely used Asynchronous Actor-Critic (A2C) algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-14 Philip Bontrager , Ahmed Khalifa , Damien Anderson , Matthew Stephenson , Christoph Salge , Julian Togelius

Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Uğurcan Özalp

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm, essentially based on entropy regularization. SAC trains a policy by maximizing the trade-off between expected return and entropy (randomness in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman

We propose a new policy iteration theory as an important extension of soft policy iteration and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), one of the most efficient model free algorithms for deep reinforcement learning. Supported by the new theory, arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng

Asymmetric actor-critic methods are widely used in partially observable reinforcement learning, but typically assume full state observability to condition the critic during training, which is often unrealistic in practice. We introduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Daniel Ebi , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Klemens Böhm

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: high sample…

Credit assignment is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Classical actor-critic methods address this challenge through fine-grained advantage estimation based on a learned value function. However, learned value models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zikang Shan , Han Zhong , Liwei Wang , Li Zhao

We present a novel method of learning style-agnostic representation using both style transfer and adversarial learning in the reinforcement learning framework. The style, here, refers to task-irrelevant details such as the color of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Juyong Lee , Seokjun Ahn , Jaesik Park

We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

In decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, agents can aggregate information from one another to learn policies that maximize a team-average objective function. Despite the willingness to cooperate with others, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-27 Martin Figura , Yixuan Lin , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta

Ideally, what confuses neural network should be confusing to humans. However, recent experiments have shown that small, imperceptible perturbations can change the network prediction. To address this gap in perception, we propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Alexander Matyasko , Lap-Pui Chau

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…

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup