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As large language models (LLMs) show increasing promise on research-level physics reasoning tasks and agentic AI becomes more common, a practical question emerges: How does the interaction between researchers and agents affect the results?…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Vasilis Niarchos , Constantinos Papageorgakis , Alexander G. Stapleton , Sokratis Trifinopoulos

The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

We investigate the combination of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms with uniform large-scale experience replay and propose solutions for two challenges: (a) efficient actor-critic learning with experience replay (b) stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Simon Schmitt , Matteo Hessel , Karen Simonyan

Quantum computing offers efficient encapsulation of high-dimensional states. In this work, we propose a novel quantum reinforcement learning approach that combines the Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm with variational quantum circuits by…

Many problems at the intersection of combinatorics and computer science require solving for a permutation that optimally matches, ranks, or sorts some data. These problems usually have a task-specific, often non-differentiable objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Patrick Emami , Sanjay Ranka

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard for training legged robots, thanks to its robustness and scalability in massively parallel simulation environments like IsaacLab. However, its on-policy nature makes it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Gianluca Sabatini , Chenhao Li , Marco Hutter

Both generative adversarial networks (GAN) in unsupervised learning and actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning (RL) have gained a reputation for being difficult to optimize. Practitioners in both fields have amassed a large number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-19 David Pfau , Oriol Vinyals

Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning makes optimal decisions dependent on system states observed by agents, but any uncertainty on the observations may mislead agents to take wrong actions. The Mean-Field Actor-Critic reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Ziyuan Zhou , Guanjun Liu

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj

We establish the convergence of the deep actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm presented in [Angiuli et al., 2023a] in the setting of continuous state and action spaces with an infinite discrete-time horizon. This algorithm provides…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Jean-Pierre Fouque , Mathieu Laurière , Mengrui Zhang

We introduce a hybrid CPU/GPU version of the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm, currently the state-of-the-art method in reinforcement learning for various gaming tasks. We analyze its computational traits and concentrate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-08 Mohammad Babaeizadeh , Iuri Frosio , Stephen Tyree , Jason Clemons , Jan Kautz

We propose a novel independent and payoff-based learning framework for stochastic games that is model-free, game-agnostic, and gradient-free. The learning dynamics follow a best-response-type actor-critic architecture, where agents update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ahmed Said Donmez , Yuksel Arslantas , Muhammed O. Sayin

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance. We provide evidence consistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Nathan Samuel de Lara , Florian Shkurti

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Honghao Wei , Xiyue Peng , Arnob Ghosh , Xin Liu

In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies. We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Scott Fujimoto , Herke van Hoof , David Meger

We introduce a sequence-conditioned critic for Soft Actor--Critic (SAC) that models trajectory context with a lightweight Transformer and trains on aggregated $N$-step targets. Unlike prior approaches that (i) score state--action pairs in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Dong Tian , Onur Celik , Gerhard Neumann

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 work examines average-reward reinforcement learning with general policy parametrization. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) guarantees for this problem are either suboptimal or hindered by several challenges, including poor scalability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal