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Deep Actor-Critic algorithms, which combine Actor-Critic with deep neural network (DNN), have been among the most prevalent reinforcement learning algorithms for decision-making problems in simulated environments. However, the existing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Kexuan Wang , An Liu , Baishuo Lin

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have significant potential for dialogue policy optimisation. However, they suffer from a poor performance in the early stages of learning. This is especially problematic for on-line learning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-06 Pei-Hao Su , Pawel Budzianowski , Stefan Ultes , Milica Gasic , Steve Young

We study policy gradient for mean-field control in continuous time in a reinforcement learning setting. By considering randomised policies with entropy regularisation, we derive a gradient expectation representation of the value function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-14 Noufel Frikha , Maximilien Germain , Mathieu Laurière , Huyên Pham , Xuanye Song

One of the challenges for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is designing efficient learning algorithms for a large system in which each agent has only limited or partial information of the entire system. While exciting progress has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Haotian Gu , Xin Guo , Xiaoli Wei , Renyuan Xu

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The aim of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a discounted…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-14 Yang Peng , Kaicheng Jin , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

TD($\lambda$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yue Deng , Zirui Wang , Yin Zhang

Since the objective functions of reinforcement learning problems are typically highly nonconvex, it is desirable that policy gradient, the most popular algorithm, escapes saddle points and arrives at second-order stationary points. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Siqiao Mu , Diego Klabjan

Many real world tasks require multiple agents to work together. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed in recent years to solve these tasks, but current methods often fail to efficiently learn policies. We thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Johannes Ackermann , Volker Gabler , Takayuki Osa , Masashi Sugiyama

Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 David Cheikhi , Daniel Russo

We prove that a single-layer neural network trained with the online actor critic algorithm converges in distribution to a random ordinary differential equation (ODE) as the number of hidden units and the number of training steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Samuel Chun-Hei Lam , Justin Sirignano , Ziheng Wang

Recent research endeavours have theoretically shown the beneficial effect of cooperation in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In a setting involving $N$ agents, this beneficial effect usually comes in the form of an $N$-fold linear…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Nicolò Dal Fabbro , Arman Adibi , Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas

Efforts in this paper seek to combine graph theory with adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) as a reinforcement learning (RL) framework to determine forward-in-time, real-time, approximate optimal controllers for distributed multi-agent…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Rushikesh Kamalapurkar , Huyen Dinh , Patrick Walters , Warren Dixon

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable empirical success by integrating deep neural networks into RL frameworks. However, these algorithms often require a large number of training samples and admit little…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Junhong Shen , Lin F. Yang

This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-12 Tao Sun , Han Shen , Tianyi Chen , Dongsheng Li

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 work develops a fully decentralized multi-agent algorithm for policy evaluation. The proposed scheme can be applied to two distinct scenarios. In the first scenario, a collection of agents have distinct datasets gathered following…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Lucas Cassano , Kun Yuan , Ali H. Sayed

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental algorithm for estimating value functions in reinforcement learning. Recent finite-time analyses of TD with linear function approximation quantify its theoretical convergence rate. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yunxiang Li , Mark Schmidt , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani

Using insight from numerical approximation of ODEs and the problem formulation and solution methodology of TD learning through a Galerkin relaxation, I propose a new class of TD learning algorithms. After applying the improved numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Caleb Bowyer

The hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Liyuan Zheng , Tanner Fiez , Zane Alumbaugh , Benjamin Chasnov , Lillian J. Ratliff

We study personalized multi-agent average reward TD learning, in which a collection of agents interacts with different environments and jointly learns their respective value functions. We focus on the setting where there exists a shared…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su