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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianxiong Li , Honglei Yin

Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

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

In many applications we seek to maximize an expectation with respect to a distribution over discrete variables. Estimating gradients of such objectives with respect to the distribution parameters is a challenging problem. We analyze…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-18 Evgeny Andriyash , Arash Vahdat , Bill Macready

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-25 Esther Derman , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Shie Mannor

Off-policy Actor-Critic algorithms have demonstrated phenomenal experimental performance but still require better explanations. To this end, we show its policy evaluation error on the distribution of transitions decomposes into: a Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Ting-Han Fan , Peter J. Ramadge

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jake Grigsby , Jin Yong Yoo , Yanjun Qi

We introduce a family of pairwise stochastic gradient estimators for gradients of expectations, which are related to the log-derivative trick, but involve pairwise interactions between samples. The simplest example of our new estimator,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Christian J. Walder , Paul Roussel , Richard Nock , Cheng Soon Ong , Masashi Sugiyama

Deep Reinforcement Learning is emerging as a promising approach for the continuous control task of robotic arm movement. However, the challenges of learning robust and versatile control capabilities are still far from being resolved for…

Existing models for the analysis of concurrent processes tend to focus on fail-stop failures, where processes are either working or permanently stopped, and their state (working/stopped) is known. In fact, systems are often affected by grey…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Laura Bocchi , Julien Lange , Simon Thompson , A. Laura Voinea

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

We address how to robustly interpret natural language refinements (or critiques) in recommender systems. In particular, in human-human recommendation settings people frequently use soft attributes to express preferences about items,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Krisztian Balog , Filip Radlinski , Alexandros Karatzoglou

Opponent modelling has proven effective in enhancing the decision-making of the controlled agent by constructing models of opponent agents. However, existing methods often rely on access to the observations and actions of opponents, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Jing Sun , Shuo Chen , Cong Zhang , Yining Ma , Jie Zhang

Deep reinforcement learning methods have shown great performance on many challenging cooperative multi-agent tasks. Two main promising research directions are multi-agent value function decomposition and multi-agent policy gradients. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Yuan Pu , Shaochen Wang , Rui Yang , Xin Yao , Bin Li

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is widely used in practical applications and is now one of the most relevant off-policy online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The technique of n-step returns is known to increase the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jakub Łyskawa , Jakub Lewandowski , Paweł Wawrzyński

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, growing demand variability, and evolving grid control strategies, accurate and efficient load modeling has become a critical yet challenging task. Traditional methods, such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-11 Ding Lin , Han Guo , Jianhui Wang , Meng Yue , Tianqiao Zhao

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…