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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

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

In cooperative stochastic games multiple agents work towards learning joint optimal actions in an unknown environment to achieve a common goal. In many real-world applications, however, constraints are often imposed on the actions that can…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Sai Koti Reddy Danda , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Background: Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient-based reinforcement learning algorithms utilize Actor-Critic architectures, where both networks are typically trained using identical batches of replayed transitions. However, the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Mehmet Efe Lorasdagi , Dogan Can Cicek , Furkan Burak Mutlu , Suleyman Serdar Kozat

This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Niao He , Lihong Li , Le Song

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Ting-Han Fan , Peter J. Ramadge

This paper introduces language-based agent control (LBAC), a new programming model for agentic applications that brings techniques from programming languages and language-based security to the problem of agent control. In conventional…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Timothy Zhou , Loris D'Antoni , Nadia Polikarpova

We present GuidedSAC, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that facilitates efficient exploration in vast state-action spaces. GuidedSAC leverages large language models (LLMs) as intelligent supervisors that provide action-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Hao Ma , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Huimu Wang

Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Jonathan Lebensold , William Hamilton , Borja Balle , Doina Precup

Discrete reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated exceptional performance in solving sequential decision tasks with discrete action spaces, such as Atari games. However, their effectiveness is hindered when applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yechen Zhang , Jian Sun , Gang Wang , Zhuo Li , Wei Chen

The synthetic control (SC) framework is widely used for observational causal inference with time-series panel data. SC has been successful in diverse applications, but existing methods typically treat the ordering of pre-intervention time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Saeyoung Rho , Cyrus Illick , Samhitha Narasipura , Alberto Abadie , Daniel Hsu , Vishal Misra

In this paper, sample-aware policy entropy regularization is proposed to enhance the conventional policy entropy regularization for better exploration. Exploiting the sample distribution obtainable from the replay buffer, the proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Albert Wilcox , Ashwin Balakrishna , Jules Dedieu , Wyame Benslimane , Daniel S. Brown , Ken Goldberg

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, multiple agents learn simultaneously while interacting with a common environment and each other. Since the agents adapt their policies during learning, not only the behavior of a single agent becomes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Yuan Tian , Klaus-Rudolf Kladny , Qin Wang , Zhiwu Huang , Olga Fink

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various continuous control tasks, such as robot manipulation and locomotion. Different to mainstream RL which makes decisions at individual steps, recent studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Buqing Nie , Yangqing Fu , Yue Gao

In current model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, stability criteria based on sampling methods are commonly utilized to guide policy optimization. However, these criteria only guarantee the infinite-time convergence of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Shengjie Wang , Fengbo Lan , Xiang Zheng , Yuxue Cao , Oluwatosin Oseni , Haotian Xu , Tao Zhang , Yang Gao

The actor-critic RL is widely used in various robotic control tasks. By viewing the actor-critic RL from the perspective of variational inference (VI), the policy network is trained to obtain the approximate posterior of actions given the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Duo Xu , Faramarz Fekri

Standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms use a shared representation for the policy and value function, especially when training directly from images. However, we argue that more information is needed to accurately estimate the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Roberta Raileanu , Rob Fergus

We present Dynamic ReAct, a novel approach for enabling ReAct agents to efficiently operate with extensive Model Control Protocol (MCP) tool sets that exceed the contextual memory limitations of large language models. Our approach addresses…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nishant Gaurav , Adit Akarsh , Ankit Ranjan , Manoj Bajaj

Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang