English
Related papers

Related papers: Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic: Improving Exploratio…

200 papers

It is a popular belief that model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL, but in practice, it is not always true due to overweighed model errors. In complex and noisy settings, model-based RL tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Feiyang Pan , Jia He , Dandan Tu , Qing He

Deep actor-critic algorithms have reached a level where they influence everyday life. They are a driving force behind continual improvement of large language models through user feedback. However, their deployment in physical systems is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Bahareh Tasdighi , Manuel Haussmann , Yi-Shan Wu , Andres R. Masegosa , Melih Kandemir

This paper proposes the Cooperative Soft Actor Critic (CSAC) method of enabling consecutive reinforcement learning agents to cooperatively solve a long time horizon multi-stage task. This method is achieved by modifying the policy of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Jordan Erskine , Chris Lehnert

In this paper we explore how actor-critic methods in deep reinforcement learning, in particular Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C), can be extended with agent modeling. Inspired by recent works on representation learning and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Pablo Hernandez-Leal , Bilal Kartal , Matthew E. Taylor

This paper aims to find an algorithmic structure that affords to predict and explain economical choice behaviour particularly under uncertainty(random policies) by manipulating the prevalent Actor-Critic learning method to comply with the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Keyvan Yahya

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Object navigation is defined as navigating to an object of a given label in a complex, unexplored environment. In its general form, this problem poses several challenges for Robotics: semantic exploration of unknown environments in search…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Ayzaan Wahid , Austin Stone , Kevin Chen , Brian Ichter , Alexander Toshev

Given a dataset of expert agent interactions with an environment of interest, a viable method to extract an effective agent policy is to estimate the maximum likelihood policy indicated by this data. This approach is commonly referred to as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Eddy Hudson , Ishan Durugkar , Garrett Warnell , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on exploration to discover new behaviors, which is typically achieved by following a stochastic policy. In continuous control tasks, policies with a Gaussian distribution have been widely adopted.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Dmytro Korenkevych , A. Rupam Mahmood , Gautham Vasan , James Bergstra

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies from fixed datasets without online interactions, but suffers from distribution shift, causing inaccurate evaluation and overestimation of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xuyang Chen , Keyu Yan , Wenhan Cao , Lin Zhao

Warm-Start reinforcement learning (RL), aided by a prior policy obtained from offline training, is emerging as a promising RL approach for practical applications. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that the performance of Warm-Start…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Hang Wang , Sen Lin , Junshan Zhang

Learning expressive stochastic policies instead of deterministic ones has been proposed to achieve better stability, sample complexity, and robustness. Notably, in Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL), the policy is modeled as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Safa Messaoud , Billel Mokeddem , Zhenghai Xue , Linsey Pang , Bo An , Haipeng Chen , Sanjay Chawla

This work extends an established critic match loss landscape visualization method from online to off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to reveal the optimization geometry behind critic learning. Off-policy RL differs from stepwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jingyi Liu , Jian Guo , Eberhard Gill

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhiwei Shang , Xinyi Yuan , Wenjun Huang , Yunduan Cui , Di Chen , Meixin Zhu

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

We introduce D2AC, a new model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to train expressive diffusion policies online effectively. At its core is a policy improvement objective that avoids the high variance of typical policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lunjun Zhang , Shuo Han , Hanrui Lyu , Bradly C Stadie

This paper presents a new method --- adversarial advantage actor-critic (Adversarial A2C), which significantly improves the efficiency of dialogue policy learning in task-completion dialogue systems. Inspired by generative adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-02-09 Baolin Peng , Xiujun Li , Jianfeng Gao , Jingjing Liu , Yun-Nung Chen , Kam-Fai Wong

The application of deep reinforcement learning algorithms to economic battery dispatch problems has significantly increased recently. However, optimizing battery dispatch over long horizons can be challenging due to delayed rewards. In our…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-08 Manuel Sage , Martin Staniszewski , Yaoyao Fiona Zhao

Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Junfeng Wen , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Dale Schuurmans