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The actor-critic (AC) algorithm is a popular method to find an optimal policy in reinforcement learning. In the infinite horizon scenario, the finite-sample convergence rate for the AC and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

The Q-learning algorithm is known to be affected by the maximization bias, i.e. the systematic overestimation of action values, an important issue that has recently received renewed attention. Double Q-learning has been proposed as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Rong Zhu , Mattia Rigotti

Control contraction metrics (CCMs) provide a framework to co-synthesize a controller and a corresponding contraction metric -- a positive-definite Riemannian metric under which a closed-loop system is guaranteed to be incrementally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Minjae Cho , Hiroyasu Tsukamoto , Huy Trong Tran

The actor-critic RL is widely used in various robotic control tasks. By viewing the actor-critic RL from the perspective of variational inference (VI), the policy network is trained to obtain the approximate posterior of actions given the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Duo Xu , Faramarz Fekri

We show that the simplest actor-critic method -- a linear softmax policy updated with TD through interaction with a linear MDP, but featuring no explicit regularization or exploration -- does not merely find an optimal policy, but moreover…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Yuzheng Hu , Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky

Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Yue Wu , Weitong Zhang , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Motivated by the recent applications of game-theoretical learning techniques to the design of distributed control systems, we study a class of control problems that can be formulated as potential games with continuous action sets, and we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-12-03 Steven Perkins , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , David S. Leslie

Asymmetric actor-critic methods are widely used in partially observable reinforcement learning, but typically assume full state observability to condition the critic during training, which is often unrealistic in practice. We introduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Daniel Ebi , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Klemens Böhm

We develop an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for learning an optimal policy from a training set composed of data from multiple individuals. This algorithm is developed with a view towards its use in mobile health.

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-07-19 S. A. Murphy , Y. Deng , E. B. Laber , H. R. Maei , R. S. Sutton , K. Witkiewitz

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a trending paradigm for training reasoning large language models (LLMs). However, due to the autoregressive decoding nature of LLMs, the rollout process becomes the efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yuhang Li , Reena Elangovan , Xin Dong , Priyadarshini Panda , Brucek Khailany

Naively trained Deep Reinforcement Learning agents may fail to satisfy vital safety constraints. To avoid costly retraining, we may desire to repair a previously trained reinforcement learning agent to obviate unsafe behaviour. We devise a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 David Boetius , Stefan Leue

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

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

We consider the estimation of the policy gradient in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) with a special class of structured policies that are finite-state controllers. We show that the gradient estimation can be done in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Huizhen Yu

Constraint-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) involves policy constraints or imposing penalties on the value function to mitigate overestimation errors caused by distributional shift. This paper focuses on a limitation in existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Junghyuk Yeom , Yonghyeon Jo , Jungmo Kim , Sanghyeon Lee , Seungyul Han

We address the problem of distributing approximation errors in large-scale quantum programs. It has been known for some time that when compiling quantum algorithms for a fault-tolerant architecture, some operations must be approximated as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-07-09 Thomas Häner , Martin Roetteler , Krysta M. Svore

Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. The main players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients of neural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Recep Yusuf Bekci , Mehmet Gümüş

Having a perfect model to compute the optimal policy is often infeasible in reinforcement learning. It is important in high-stakes domains to quantify and manage risk induced by model uncertainties. Entropic risk measure is an exponential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Reazul Hasan Russel , Bahram Behzadian , Marek Petrik