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In this paper, we study the problem of reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems where communication among agents is limited. We develop a decentralized actor-critic learning framework in which each agent performs several local updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Xiaoxing Ren , Nicola Bastianello , Thomas Parisini , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

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

Traditional reinforcement learning methods optimize agents without considering safety, potentially resulting in unintended consequences. In this paper, we propose an optimal actor-free policy that optimizes a risk-sensitive criterion based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Ruoqi Zhang , Jens Sjölund

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

Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Yuyang Zhang , Yang Hu , Bo Dai , Na Li

Coupled human-environment systems are increasingly being understood as complex adaptive systems (CAS), in which micro-level interactions between components lead to emergent behavior. Agent-based models (ABMs) hold great promise for…

Applications · Statistics 2026-02-20 Dylan Munson , Arijit Dey , Simon Mak

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Samuel Neumann , Sungsu Lim , Ajin Joseph , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

Intelligent robots provide a new insight into efficiency improvement in industrial and service scenarios to replace human labor. However, these scenarios include dense and dynamic obstacles that make motion planning of robots challenging.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Chengmin Zhou , Bingding Huang , Pasi Fränti

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

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

Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Philippe Preux , Matthieu Geist

Experience replay enables reinforcement learning agents to memorize and reuse past experiences, just as humans replay memories for the situation at hand. Contemporary off-policy algorithms either replay past experiences uniformly or utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Daochen Zha , Kwei-Herng Lai , Kaixiong Zhou , Xia Hu

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms, which aim to learn a model of the environment to make decisions, are more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts. The sample efficiency of model-based approaches relies on whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Zhihai Wang , Jie Wang , Qi Zhou , Bin Li , Houqiang Li

Policy gradient methods are an attractive approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their convergence properties and robustness in partially observable scenarios. However, there is a significant performance gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Bozhidar Vasilev , Tarun Gupta , Bei Peng , Shimon Whiteson

The sample-inefficiency problem in Artificial Intelligence refers to the inability of current Deep Reinforcement Learning models to optimize action policies within a small number of episodes. Recent studies have tried to overcome this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Ismael T. Freire , Adrián F. Amil , Vasiliki Vouloutsi , Paul F. M. J. Verschure

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, growing demand variability, and evolving grid control strategies, accurate and efficient load modeling has become a critical yet challenging task. Traditional methods, such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-11 Ding Lin , Han Guo , Jianhui Wang , Meng Yue , Tianqiao Zhao

As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

In many engineered systems, optimization is used for decision making at time-scales ranging from real-time operation to long-term planning. This process often involves solving similar optimization problems over and over again with slightly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-18 Sidhant Misra , Line Roald , Yeesian Ng

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 aim to develop off-policy DRL algorithms that not only exceed state-of-the-art performance but are also simple and minimalistic. For standard continuous control benchmarks, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which employs entropy maximization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Che Wang , Yanqiu Wu , Quan Vuong , Keith Ross