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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

Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, particularly in the experience replay setting now commonly used with deep neural networks. Classically, off-policy estimation bias is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Brett Daley , Christopher Amato

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aishwarya Mandyam , Shengpu Tang , Jiayu Yao , Jenna Wiens , Barbara E. Engelhardt

Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems in practice are offline, learning purely from observational data. A key challenge is how to ensure the learned policy is safe, which requires quantifying the risk associated with different actions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Yecheng Jason Ma , Dinesh Jayaraman , Osbert Bastani

In many real-world reinforcement learning applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed dataset, instead of direct (online) interaction with the environment. When using this data for either evaluation or training of a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Ofir Nachum , Yinlam Chow , Bo Dai , Lihong Li

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning. By combining off-policy updates with an actor-critic formulation, SAC achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Che Wang , Keith Ross

The finite-time convergence of off-policy TD learning has been comprehensively studied recently. However, such a type of convergence has not been well established for off-policy TD learning in the multi-agent setting, which covers broader…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Rongrong Chen

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success, yet its deployment in real-world scenarios is often limited by vulnerability to environmental uncertainties. Distributionally robust RL (DR-RL) algorithms have been proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mingxuan Cui , Duo Zhou , Yuxuan Han , Grani A. Hanasusanto , Qiong Wang , Huan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) generate a large number of false alerts which makes it difficult to inspect true positives. Hence, alert prioritization plays a crucial role in deciding which alerts to investigate from an enormous number…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Lalitha Chavali , Tanay Gupta , Paresh Saxena

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

Decentralized Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms have been widely utilized for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and have achieved remarkable success. Apart from its empirical success, the theoretical convergence property of decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Qijun Luo , Xiao Li

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman , Mohsen Zamani

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Luca Grillotti , Maxence Faldor , Borja G. León , Antoine Cully

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 optimal policy of a reinforcement learning problem is often discontinuous and non-smooth. I.e., for two states with similar representations, their optimal policies can be significantly different. In this case, representing the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Zhimin Hou , Kuangen Zhang , Yi Wan , Dongyu Li , Chenglong Fu , Haoyong Yu

We propose a new objective, the counterfactual objective, unifying existing objectives for off-policy policy gradient algorithms in the continuing reinforcement learning (RL) setting. Compared to the commonly used excursion objective, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Shangtong Zhang , Wendelin Boehmer , Shimon Whiteson

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods designed to handle adversarial input observations have received significant attention, motivated by RL's inherent vulnerabilities. While existing approaches have demonstrated reasonable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kosuke Nakanishi , Akihiro Kubo , Yuji Yasui , Shin Ishii