Related papers: A Small Gain Analysis of Single Timescale Actor Cr…
We address the issue of estimation bias in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) by introducing solution mechanisms that include a new, twin TD-regularized actor-critic (TDR) method. It aims at reducing both over and under-estimation errors.…
The notions of asymptotic amplitude for signals, and Cauchy gain for input/output systems, and an associated small-gain principle, are introduced. These concepts allow the consideration of systems with multiple, and possibly…
In this paper we investigate quasi-stationary distributions {\mu}_N of stochastic approximation algorithms with constant step size which can be viewed as random perturbations of a time-continuous dynamical system. Inspired by ecological…
We present temporally abstract actor-critic (TAAC), a simple but effective off-policy RL algorithm that incorporates closed-loop temporal abstraction into the actor-critic framework. TAAC adds a second-stage binary policy to choose between…
We study a sequential decision-making problem for a profit-maximizing operator of an autonomous mobility-on-demand system. Optimizing a central operator's vehicle-to-request dispatching policy requires efficient and effective fleet control…
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…
This paper is devoted to change-point detection using only the ordinal structure of a time series. A statistic based on the conditional entropy of ordinal patterns characterizing the local up and down in a time series is introduced and…
We consider stochastic approximation with block-coordinate stepsizes and propose adaptive stepsize rules that aim to minimize the expected distance from the next iterate to an (unknown) target point. These stepsize rules employ online…
We consider the application of feedback control strategies with point actuators to stabilise desired interface shapes. We take a multidimensional Kuramoto--Sivashinsky equation as a test case; this equation arises in the study of thin…
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…
The dataset distributions in offline reinforcement learning (RL) often exhibit complex and multi-modal distributions, necessitating expressive policies to capture such distributions beyond widely-used Gaussian policies. To handle such…
This brief pedagogical note re-proves a simple theorem on the convergence, in $L_2$ and in probability, of time averages of non-stationary time series to the mean of expectation values. The basic condition is that the sum of covariances…
This paper addresses the problem of segmenting a stream of graph signals: we aim to detect changes in the mean of a multivariate signal defined over the nodes of a known graph. We propose an offline method that relies on the concept of…
While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of…
Actor-critic algorithms have shown remarkable success in solving state-of-the-art decision-making problems. However, despite their empirical effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively unexplored, especially with neural…
In this paper, we study the problem of reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems where communication among agents is limited. We develop a decentralized actor-critic learning framework in which each agent performs several local updates…
We consider the problem of estimating the location of a single change point in a dynamic stochastic block model. We propose two methods of estimating the change point, together with the model parameters. The first employs a least squares…
In this article we consider an optimization problem where the objective function is evaluated at the fixed-point of a contraction mapping parameterized by a control variable, and optimization takes place over this control variable. Since…
A measure of primal importance for capturing the serial dependence of a stationary time series at extreme levels is provided by the limiting cluster size distribution. New estimators based on a blocks declustering scheme are proposed and…
We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…