English
Related papers

Related papers: TAAC: Temporally Abstract Actor-Critic for Continu…

200 papers

Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Anand Kamat , Doina Precup

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

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

We study the adaption of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which is considered as a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, from continuous action space to discrete action space. We revisit vanilla discrete SAC and provide an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Haibin Zhou , Tong Wei , Zichuan Lin , junyou li , Junliang Xing , Yuanchun Shi , Li Shen , Chao Yu , Deheng Ye

We identify a fundamental problem in policy gradient-based methods in continuous control. As policy gradient methods require the agent's underlying probability distribution, they limit policy representation to parametric distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Chen Tessler , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

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

Biological agents learn and act intelligently in spite of a highly limited capacity to process and store information. Many real-world problems involve continuous control, which represents a difficult task for artificial intelligence agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Tailia Malloy , Chris R. Sims , Tim Klinger , Miao Liu , Matthew Riemer , Gerald Tesauro

The trend is to implement intelligent agents capable of analyzing available information and utilize it efficiently. This work presents a number of reinforcement learning (RL) architectures; one of them is designed for intelligent agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Ala'eddin Masadeh , Zhengdao Wang , Ahmed E. Kamal

Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Simon Ramstedt , Yann Bouteiller , Giovanni Beltrame , Christopher Pal , Jonathan Binas

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

This paper introduces the Active-Importance-Sampling Actor-Critic (AISAC) algorithm, an extension of the Actor-Critic framework for reducing variance in policy gradient estimation. AISAC optimizes the behavior policy to minimize gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Majid Molaei , Gabor Paczolay , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Reza Asad , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani

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

Uncertainty quantification has been extensively used as a means to achieve efficient directed exploration in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, state-of-the-art methods for continuous actions still suffer from high sample complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Amarildo Likmeta , Matteo Sacco , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

We present TASC, a Task-Aware Shared Control framework for teleoperated manipulation that infers task-level user intent and provides assistance throughout the task. To support everyday tasks without predefined knowledge, TASC constructs an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Ze Fu , Pinhao Song , Yutong Hu , Renaud Detry

State-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable performance in continuous control tasks, yet their computational complexity is often incompatible with the constraints of resource-limited hardware, due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Riccardo De Monte , Matteo Cederle , Gian Antonio Susto

Deciding what and when to observe is critical when making observations is costly. In a medical setting where observations can be made sequentially, making these observations (or not) should be an active choice. We refer to this as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Jinsung Yoon , James Jordon , Mihaela van der Schaar

This paper presents a novel algorithm for the continuous control of dynamical systems that combines Trajectory Optimization (TO) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a single framework. The motivations behind this algorithm are the two main…

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Large language model (LLM) agents -- LLMs that dynamically interact with an environment over long horizons -- have become an increasingly important area of research, enabling automation in complex tasks involving tool-use, web browsing, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Joey Hong , Kang Liu , Zhan Ling , Jiecao Chen , Sergey Levine