Related papers: Actor-critic is implicitly biased towards high ent…
We study the robustness of deep reinforcement learning algorithms against distribution shifts within contextual multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problems from the operations research domain. In this context, risk-sensitive…
Hyper-parameter optimization is a crucial problem in machine learning as it aims to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in any model. Great efforts have been made in this field, such as random search, grid search, Bayesian…
We consider a Markov decision process (MDP) in which actions prescribed by the controller are executed by a separate actuator, which may behave adversarially. At each time step, the controller selects and transmits an action to the…
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 this paper, we present a new intrinsically motivated actor-critic algorithm for learning continuous motor skills directly from raw visual input. Our neural architecture is composed of a critic and an actor network. Both networks receive…
We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient…
Learning expressive stochastic policies instead of deterministic ones has been proposed to achieve better stability, sample complexity, and robustness. Notably, in Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL), the policy is modeled as…
On error of value function inevitably causes an overestimation phenomenon and has a negative impact on the convergence of the algorithms. To mitigate the negative effects of the approximation error, we propose Error Controlled Actor-critic…
We propose a novel independent and payoff-based learning framework for stochastic games that is model-free, game-agnostic, and gradient-free. The learning dynamics follow a best-response-type actor-critic architecture, where agents update…
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…
In decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, agents can aggregate information from one another to learn policies that maximize a team-average objective function. Despite the willingness to cooperate with others, the…
In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…
This paper presents AFU, an off-policy deep RL algorithm addressing in a new way the challenging "max-Q problem" in Q-learning for continuous action spaces, with a solution based on regression and conditional gradient scaling. AFU has an…
In this paper, we establish last-iterate convergence rates for off-policy actor--critic methods in reinforcement learning. In particular, under a single-loop, single-timescale implementation and a broad class of policy updates, including…
Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and…
Off-Policy Actor-Critic (Off-PAC) methods have proven successful in a variety of continuous control tasks. Normally, the critic's action-value function is updated using temporal-difference, and the critic in turn provides a loss for the…
Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…
In this work, we propose Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic (BAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm. BAC mathematically formulates the behavior of the policy through autoencoders by providing an accurate estimation of how frequently…
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…
This work uses the entropy-regularised relaxed stochastic control perspective as a principled framework for designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Herein agent interacts with the environment by generating noisy controls…