Related papers: Finite-Sample Analysis of Off-Policy Natural Actor…
In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…
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…
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…
Natural actor-critic (NAC) and its variants, equipped with the representation power of neural networks, have demonstrated impressive empirical success in solving Markov decision problems with large state spaces. In this paper, we present a…
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…
Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…
We establish an optimal sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ for obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal global policy using a single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) with…
Off-policy Actor-Critic algorithms have demonstrated phenomenal experimental performance but still require better explanations. To this end, we show its policy evaluation error on the distribution of transitions decomposes into: a Bellman…
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…
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…
Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…
Actor-critic algorithms have shown remarkable success in solving state-of-the-art decision-making problems. However, despite their empirical effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively unexplored, especially with neural…
While on-policy algorithms are known for their stability, they often demand a substantial number of samples. In contrast, off-policy algorithms, which leverage past experiences, are considered sample-efficient but tend to exhibit…
In this paper, we establish last-iterate convergence rates for off-policy actor--critic methods in reinforcement learning. In particular, under a single-loop, single-timescale implementation and a broad class of policy updates, including…
Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…
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…
In this paper, we establish the global optimality and convergence rate of an off-policy actor critic algorithm in the tabular setting without using density ratio to correct the discrepancy between the state distribution of the behavior…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many domains, such as video games, recommendation systems and robotic control tasks. In continuous control tasks, widely used policies with Gaussian distributions results…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides a framework for problems involving multiple interacting agents. Despite apparent similarity to the single-agent case, multi-agent problems are often harder to train and analyze…