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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

In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-28 Weijian Li , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

We show that offline actor-critic reinforcement learning can scale to large models - such as transformers - and follows similar scaling laws as supervised learning. We find that offline actor-critic algorithms can outperform strong,…

Optimal control problems with free terminal time present many challenges including nonsmooth and discontinuous control laws, irregular value functions, many local optima, and the curse of dimensionality. To overcome these issues, we propose…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-08 Evan Burton , Tenavi Nakamura-Zimmerer , Qi Gong , Wei Kang

Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Zhiyao Zhang , Myeung Suk Oh , FNU Hairi , Ziyue Luo , Alvaro Velasquez , Jia Liu

Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Semih Cayci , Niao He , R. Srikant

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia , Jiaqi Yan

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

Extracting relevant information from a stream of high-dimensional observations is a central challenge for deep reinforcement learning agents. Actor-critic algorithms add further complexity to this challenge, as it is often unclear whether…

Actor-critic methods can achieve incredible performance on difficult reinforcement learning problems, but they are also prone to instability. This is partly due to the interaction between the actor and critic during learning, e.g., an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Simone Parisi , Voot Tangkaratt , Jan Peters , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

Decentralized Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms have been widely utilized for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and have achieved remarkable success. Apart from its empirical success, the theoretical convergence property of decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Qijun Luo , Xiao Li

We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sanjeev Manivannan , Shuban V

Deterministic policy gradient algorithms are foundational for actor-critic methods in controlling continuous systems, yet they often encounter inaccuracies due to their dependence on the derivative of the critic's value estimates with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Baturay Saglam , Dionysis Kalogerias

We present Wasserstein Adaptive Value Estimation for Actor-Critic (WAVE), an approach to enhance stability in deep reinforcement learning through adaptive Wasserstein regularization. Our method addresses the inherent instability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Ali Baheri , Zahra Shahrooei , Chirayu Salgarkar

We study the convergence of the actor-critic algorithm with nonlinear function approximation under a nonconvex-nonconcave primal-dual formulation. Stochastic gradient descent ascent is applied with an adaptive proximal term for robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Jing Dong , Li Shen , Yinggan Xu , Baoxiang Wang

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

High-precision control tasks present substantial challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, frequently resulting in suboptimal performance attributed to network approximation inaccuracies and inadequate sample quality.These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Donghe Chen , Yubin Peng , Tengjie Zheng , Han Wang , Chaoran Qu , Lin Cheng