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Many problems at the intersection of combinatorics and computer science require solving for a permutation that optimally matches, ranks, or sorts some data. These problems usually have a task-specific, often non-differentiable objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Patrick Emami , Sanjay Ranka

In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Weiya Ren

Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Carson Eisenach , Haichuan Yang , Ji Liu , Han Liu

We study reinforcement learning by combining recent advances in regularized linear programming formulations with the classical theory of stochastic approximation. Motivated by the challenge of designing algorithms that leverage off-policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-15 Axel Friedrich Wolter , Tobias Sutter

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

The hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Liyuan Zheng , Tanner Fiez , Zane Alumbaugh , Benjamin Chasnov , Lillian J. Ratliff

Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-06-09 Aviv Tamar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Zhiao Huang , Litian Liang , Zhan Ling , Xuanlin Li , Chuang Gan , Hao Su

Neural Network based approximations of the Value function make up the core of leading Policy Based methods such as Trust Regional Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). While this adds significant value when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Hari Srikanth

Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Firas Al-Hafez , Guoping Zhao , Jan Peters , Davide Tateo

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia , Jiaqi Yan

Actor-critic algorithms for deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) typically employ a policy update that responds to the current strategies of other agents. While being straightforward, this approach does not account for the updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Aryaman Reddi , Gabriele Tiboni , Jan Peters , Carlo D'Eramo

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Akshay Dharmavaram , Matthew Riemer , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning (RL) -- algorithms that teach artificial agents to interact with environments by maximising reward signals -- has achieved significant success in recent years. These successes have been facilitated by advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Llewyn Salt , Marcus Gallagher

This paper develops a policy gradient method for entropy-regularized mean-field control in the discounted infinite-horizon setting. We consider randomized feedback policies and a coupled representative-particle/population system, in which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Erhan Bayraktar , Martin Hernandez , Qinxin Yan , Yuhua Zhu

This paper introduces PG-Rainbow, a novel algorithm that incorporates a distributional reinforcement learning framework with a policy gradient algorithm. Existing policy gradient methods are sample inefficient and rely on the mean of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-22 WooJae Jeon , KangJun Lee , Jeewoo Lee

We study the continuous-time counterpart of Q-learning for reinforcement learning (RL) under the entropy-regularized, exploratory diffusion process formulation introduced by Wang et al. (2020). As the conventional (big) Q-function collapses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank