Related papers: Error Controlled Actor-Critic
We introduce a class of variational actor-critic algorithms based on a variational formulation over both the value function and the policy. The objective function of the variational formulation consists of two parts: one for maximizing the…
Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…
Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…
Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…
Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…
In this paper, we present a probability one convergence proof, under suitable conditions, of a certain class of actor-critic algorithms for finding approximate solutions to entropy-regularized MDPs using the machinery of stochastic…
Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…
Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…
In cooperative stochastic games multiple agents work towards learning joint optimal actions in an unknown environment to achieve a common goal. In many real-world applications, however, constraints are often imposed on the actions that can…
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…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
Many reinforcement learning methods achieve great success in practice but lack theoretical foundation. In this paper, we study the convergence analysis on the problem of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The global linear convergence…
How to obtain good value estimation is one of the key problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current value estimation methods, such as DDPG and TD3, suffer from unnecessary over- or underestimation bias. In this paper, we explore the…
We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…
In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…
Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…
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…
Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…
Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…
Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…