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In this work, we consider the problem of computing optimal actions for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in a co-operative setting, where the objective is to optimize a common goal. However, in many real-life applications, in addition to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-08 P. Parnika , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Sai Koti Reddy Danda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-02 Erfaun Noorani , Christos Mavridis , John Baras

Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

Policy optimization methods remain a powerful workhorse in empirical Reinforcement Learning (RL), with a focus on neural policies that can easily reason over complex and continuous state and/or action spaces. Theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Alekh Agarwal , Lin F. Yang

Learning from real-world robot demonstrations holds promise for interacting with complex real-world environments. However, the complexity and variability of interaction dynamics often cause purely positional controllers to struggle with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Lai Wei , Xuanbin Peng , Ri-Zhao Qiu , Tianshu Huang , Xuxin Cheng , Xiaolong Wang

Actor-Critic models are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that have demonstrated effectiveness across various robot learning tasks. While considerable research has focused on improving training stability and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Hanlan Yang , Itamar Mishani , Luca Pivetti , Zachary Kingston , Maxim Likhachev

Reinforcement learning (RL) in low-data and risk-sensitive domains requires performant and flexible deployment policies that can readily incorporate constraints during deployment. One such class of policies are the semi-parametric H-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Harshit Sikchi , Wenxuan Zhou , David Held

Off-Policy Actor-Critic (Off-PAC) methods have proven successful in a variety of continuous control tasks. Normally, the critic's action-value function is updated using temporal-difference, and the critic in turn provides a loss for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Wei Zhou , Yiying Li , Yongxin Yang , Huaimin Wang , Timothy M. Hospedales

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful and accurate method to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, HMC techniques are computationally demanding for Bayesian neural networks due to the high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-11 Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan , Tamer A. Zaki , Michael D. Shields

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable performance in numerous sequential decision making and control tasks. However, a common problem is that learned nearly optimal policy always overfits to the training environment and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Yangang Ren , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yang Guan , Qi Sun

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Continuous control tasks in reinforcement learning are important because they provide an important framework for learning in high-dimensional state spaces with deceptive rewards, where the agent can easily become trapped into suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Thang Doan , Bogdan Mazoure , Moloud Abdar , Audrey Durand , Joelle Pineau , R Devon Hjelm

Model predictive control (MPC) is a powerful trajectory optimization control technique capable of controlling complex nonlinear systems while respecting system constraints and ensuring safe operation. The MPC's capabilities come at the cost…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-23 Eivind Bøhn , Sebastien Gros , Signe Moe , Tor Arne Johansen

Reinforcement learning (RL), known for its self-evolution capability, offers a promising approach to training high-level autonomous driving systems. However, handling constraints remains a significant challenge for existing RL algorithms,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Feihong Zhang , Guojian Zhan , Bin Shuai , Tianyi Zhang , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in tackling many complex real-world tasks, by leveraging previously collected data for policy learning. However, most existing off-policy RL algorithms fail to maximally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Yu Luo , Tianying Ji , Fuchun Sun , Jianwei Zhang , Huazhe Xu , Xianyuan Zhan

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an appealing formalism for learning control policies from experience. However, the classic active formulation of RL necessitates a lengthy active exploration process for each behavior, making it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ashvin Nair , Abhishek Gupta , Murtaza Dalal , Sergey Levine

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm, called Renewal Monte Carlo (RMC), for infinite horizon Markov decision processes with a designated start state. RMC is a Monte Carlo algorithm and retains the advantages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Jayakumar Subramanian , Aditya Mahajan

Achieving safe and coordinated behavior in dynamic, constraint-rich environments remains a major challenge for learning-based control. Pure end-to-end learning often suffers from poor sample efficiency and limited reliability, while…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-10 Max Studt , Georg Schildbach