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This work examines average-reward reinforcement learning with general policy parametrization. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) guarantees for this problem are either suboptimal or hindered by several challenges, including poor scalability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We investigate the neural Actor Critic algorithm using shallow neural networks for both the Actor and Critic models. The focus of this work is twofold: first, to compare the convergence properties of the network outputs under various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Nikos Georgoudios , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos , Justin Sirignano

We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Semih Cayci , Niao He , R. Srikant

In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Aditya Mahajan

To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

We introduce a class of networked Markov potential games in which agents are associated with nodes in a network. Each agent has its own local potential function, and the reward of each agent depends only on the states and actions of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Zhaoyi Zhou , Zaiwei Chen , Yiheng Lin , Adam Wierman

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhiwei Shang , Xinyi Yuan , Wenjun Huang , Yunduan Cui , Di Chen , Meixin Zhu

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

Mean-field games (MFG) were introduced to efficiently analyze approximate Nash equilibria in large population settings. In this work, we consider entropy-regularized mean-field games with a finite state-action space in a discrete time…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Yue Guan , Mi Zhou , Ali Pakniyat , Panagiotis Tsiotras

Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Harshat Kumar , Alec Koppel , Alejandro Ribeiro

We study discrete-time mean-field Markov games with infinite numbers of agents where each agent aims to minimize its ergodic cost. We consider the setting where the agents have identical linear state transitions and quadratic cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-17 Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Zhaoran Wang

This work focuses on the entropy-regularized independent natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this work, agents are assumed to have access to an oracle with exact policy evaluation and seek to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Youbang Sun , Tao Liu , P. R. Kumar , Shahin Shahrampour

Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-25 Deven Sethi , David Šiška , Yufei Zhang

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 analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Navdeep Kumar , Priyank Agrawal , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

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

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

Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Rui Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Zaiwei Chen , Sajad Khodadadian , Siva Theja Maguluri

While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has produced numerous algorithms that converge to Nash or related equilibria, such equilibria are often non-unique and can exhibit widely varying efficiency. This raises a fundamental…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Runyu Zhang , Gioele Zardini , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Na Li