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We study the decentralized online regularized linear regression algorithm over random time-varying graphs. At each time step, every node runs an online estimation algorithm consisting of an innovation term processing its own new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiwei Zhang , Tao Li , Xiaozheng Fu

The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

Online reinforcement learning is becoming increasingly important for aligning diffusion models with non-differentiable objectives. However, existing methods still face limitations in assigning fine-grained credit along denoising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhengyang Liang , Qihang Zhang , Ceyuan Yang

We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven a powerful technique in many sequential decision making domains. However, Robotics poses many challenges for RL, most notably training on a physical system can be expensive and dangerous, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-10-19 Lerrel Pinto , Marcin Andrychowicz , Peter Welinder , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

We consider a discounted cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) policy optimization problem, in which an agent seeks to maximize a discounted cumulative reward subject to a number of constraints on discounted cumulative utilities.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-21 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

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…

Deep learning regularization techniques, such as dropout, layer normalization, or weight decay, are widely adopted in the construction of modern artificial neural networks, often resulting in more robust training processes and improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Denis Tarasov , Anja Surina , Caglar Gulcehre

Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman , Mohsen Zamani

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Melrose Roderick , Gaurav Manek , Felix Berkenkamp , J. Zico Kolter

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has attracted much research attention recently. However, unlike its single-agent counterpart, many theoretical and algorithmic aspects of MARL have not been well-understood. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Siliang Zeng , Tianyi Chen , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Synchronizing decisions across multiple agents in realistic settings is problematic since it requires agents to wait for other agents to terminate and communicate about termination reliably. Ideally, agents should learn and execute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Yuchen Xiao , Weihao Tan , Christopher Amato

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

We investigate the discounting mismatch in actor-critic algorithm implementations from a representation learning perspective. Theoretically, actor-critic algorithms usually have discounting for both actor and critic, i.e., there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Shangtong Zhang , Romain Laroche , Harm van Seijen , Shimon Whiteson , Remi Tachet des Combes

This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Niao He , Lihong Li , Le Song

Actor-critic algorithms have shown remarkable success in solving state-of-the-art decision-making problems. However, despite their empirical effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively unexplored, especially with neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Mudit Gaur , Amrit Singh Bedi , Di Wang , Vaneet Aggarwal

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin