English
Related papers

Related papers: Global Convergence of the ODE Limit for Online Act…

200 papers

The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qinxun Bai , Yuxuan Han , Wei Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

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

This paper presents the first sufficient conditions that guarantee the stability and almost sure convergence of multi-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) iterates. It extends the existing results on one-timescale and two-timescale SA…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-16 Rohan Deb , Swetha Ganesh , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We consider the problem of finding stationary Nash equilibria (NE) in a finite discounted general-sum stochastic game. We first generalize a non-linear optimization problem from Filar and Vrieze [2004] to a $N$-player setting and break down…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-06 H. L Prasad , L. A. Prashanth , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Jonathan Lebensold , William Hamilton , Borja Balle , Doina Precup

This study presents a benchmark for evaluating action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In action-constrained RL, each action taken by the learning system must comply with certain constraints. These constraints are crucial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Kazumi Kasaura , Shuwa Miura , Tadashi Kozuno , Ryo Yonetani , Kenta Hoshino , Yohei Hosoe

We present the first provably convergent two-timescale off-policy actor-critic algorithm (COF-PAC) with function approximation. Key to COF-PAC is the introduction of a new critic, the emphasis critic, which is trained via Gradient Emphasis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Shangtong Zhang , Bo Liu , Hengshuai Yao , Shimon Whiteson

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

An off policy reinforcement learning based control strategy is developed for the optimal tracking control problem to achieve the prescribed performance of full states during the learning process. The optimal tracking control problem is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-02 C. Li , Y. Wang , F. Liu , M. Buss

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Luca Grillotti , Maxence Faldor , Borja G. León , Antoine Cully

Many real-world control problems, ranging from finance to robotics, evolve in continuous time with non-uniform, event-driven decisions. Standard discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL), based on fixed-step Bellman updates, struggles in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Minh Nguyen

We prove the stability and global convergence of a coupled actor-critic gradient flow for infinite-horizon and entropy-regularised Markov decision processes (MDPs) in continuous state and action space with linear function approximation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-17 Denis Zorba , David Šiška , Lukasz Szpruch

In this paper, we provide a general framework for studying multi-agent online learning problems in the presence of delays and asynchronicities. Specifically, we propose and analyze a class of adaptive dual averaging schemes in which agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Yu-Guan Hsieh , Franck Iutzeler , Jérôme Malick , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

We propose a general formulation for addressing reinforcement learning (RL) problems in settings with observational data. That is, we consider the problem of learning good policies solely from historical data in which unobserved factors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Chaochao Lu , Bernhard Schölkopf , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Recent literature on online learning has focused on developing adaptive algorithms that take advantage of a regularity of the sequence of observations, yet retain worst-case performance guarantees. A complementary direction is to develop…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-01-27 Ali Jadbabaie , Alexander Rakhlin , Shahin Shahrampour , Karthik Sridharan

In this paper, we present a novel algorithm named synchronous integral Q-learning, which is based on synchronous policy iteration, to solve the continuous-time infinite horizon optimal control problems of input-affine system dynamics. The…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-05-20 Lei Guo , Han Zhao