English
Related papers

Related papers: Characterizing the Gap Between Actor-Critic and Po…

200 papers

In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Safwan Labbi , Paul Mangold , Daniil Tiapkin , Eric Moulines

Exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning is a challenging problem, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We propose a general method for efficient exploration by sharing experience amongst agents. Our proposed algorithm,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Filippos Christianos , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

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

Decentralized (PO)MDPs provide an expressive framework for sequential decision making in a multiagent system. Given their computational complexity, recent research has focused on tractable yet practical subclasses of Dec-POMDPs. We address…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-11 Duc Thien Nguyen , Akshat Kumar , Hoong Chuin Lau

Deep reinforcement learning for multi-agent cooperation and competition has been a hot topic recently. This paper focuses on cooperative multi-agent problem based on actor-critic methods under local observations settings. Multi agent deep…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hangjun Ye

In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Aditya Mahajan

Reinforcement learning algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, typically requiring significant manual effort to identify hyperparameters that perform well on a new domain. In this paper, we take a step towards…

Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Carson Eisenach , Haichuan Yang , Ji Liu , Han Liu

Actors and critics in actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms are functionally separate, yet they often use the same network architectures. This case study explores the performance impact of network sizes when considering actor and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Siddharth Mysore , Bassel Mabsout , Renato Mancuso , Kate Saenko

Value-based methods of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), especially the value decomposition methods, have been demonstrated on a range of challenging cooperative tasks. However, current methods pay little attention to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Xiaoteng Ma , Yiqin Yang , Chenghao Li , Yiwen Lu , Qianchuan Zhao , Yang Jun

Long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks pose a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning, since single-step TD learning suffers from bootstrapping error accumulation across successive Bellman updates. Actor-critic methods with action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Qian Chen , Junqiao Zhao , Hongtu Zhou , Hang Yu , Yanping Zhao , Chen Ye , Guang Chen

Multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods recently witness vigorous progress. However, there is a significant performance discrepancy between MAPG methods and state-of-the-art multi-agent value-based approaches. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Yihan Wang , Beining Han , Tonghan Wang , Heng Dong , Chongjie Zhang

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Ziheng Wang , Justin Sirignano

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

Adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (AIRL) stands as a cornerstone approach in imitation learning, yet it faces criticisms from prior studies. In this paper, we rethink AIRL and respond to these criticisms. Criticism 1 lies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yangchun Zhang , Qiang Liu , Weiming Li , Yirui Zhou

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

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

Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Olya Mastikhina , Dhruv Sreenivas , Pablo Samuel Castro

In this paper, we propose an actor ensemble algorithm, named ACE, for continuous control with a deterministic policy in reinforcement learning. In ACE, we use actor ensemble (i.e., multiple actors) to search the global maxima of the critic.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-12 Shangtong Zhang , Hao Chen , Hengshuai Yao