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Decentralized Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms have been widely utilized for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and have achieved remarkable success. Apart from its empirical success, the theoretical convergence property of decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Qijun Luo , Xiao Li

Continuous control of non-stationary environments is a major challenge for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The time-dependency of the state transition dynamics aggravates the notorious stability problems of model-free deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Abdullah Akgül , Gulcin Baykal , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

We consider a discounted cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) policy optimization problem, in which an agent seeks to maximize a discounted cumulative reward subject to a number of constraints on discounted cumulative utilities.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-21 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

We study sequential decision-making when the agent's internal model class is misspecified. Within the infinite-horizon Berk-Nash framework, stable behavior arises as a fixed point: the agent acts optimally relative to a subjective model,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Quanyan Zhu , Zhengye Han

We study two-layer neural networks in the mean field limit, where the number of neurons tends to infinity. In this regime, the optimization over the neuron parameters becomes the optimization over the probability measures, and by adding an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-17 Fan Chen , Zhenjie Ren , Songbo Wang

Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Zhiyao Zhang , Myeung Suk Oh , FNU Hairi , Ziyue Luo , Alvaro Velasquez , Jia Liu

Entropy regularization is a popular method in reinforcement learning (RL). Although it has many advantages, it alters the RL objective of the original Markov Decision Process (MDP). Though divergence regularization has been proposed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Kefan Su , Zongqing Lu

Achieving robust coordination and cooperation is a central challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Uncovering the mechanisms underlying such emergent behaviors calls for a dynamical understanding of learn processes. In this…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-01-13 Yuxin Geng , Wolfram Barfuss , Feng Fu , Xingru Chen

Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Shicong Cen , Chen Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi

Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Menno van Zutphen , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Maurice Heemels , Duarte Antunes

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms show remarkable performance in complex simulated environments. A key element of SAC networks is entropy regularization, which prevents the SAC actor from optimizing against fine grained features,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Miguel Campo , Zhengxing Chen , Luke Kung , Kittipat Virochsiri , Jianyu Wang

Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang

Existing training criteria in automatic speech recognition(ASR) permit the model to freely explore more than one time alignments between the feature and label sequences. In this paper, we use entropy to measure a model's uncertainty, i.e.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-26 Ehsan Variani , Ke Wu , David Rybach , Cyril Allauzen , Michael Riley

We propose a novel actor-critic algorithm with guaranteed convergence to an optimal policy for a discounted reward Markov decision process. The actor incorporates a descent direction that is motivated by the solution of a certain non-linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-30 Prashanth L. A. , H. L. Prasad , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Prakash Chandra

Abstract reasoning and logic inference are difficult problems for neural networks, yet essential to their applicability in highly structured domains. In this work we demonstrate that a well known technique such as spectral regularization…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Victor Kolev , Bogdan Georgiev , Svetlin Penkov

We study the error introduced by entropy regularization in infinite-horizon discrete discounted Markov decision processes. We show that this error decreases exponentially in the inverse regularization strength, both in a weighted…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Johannes Müller , Semih Cayci

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), developed by the graph learning community, have been adopted and shown to be highly effective in multi-robot and multi-agent learning. Inspired by this successful cross-pollination, we investigate and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Siva Kailas , Shalin Jain , Harish Ravichandar

Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Haoya Li , Samarth Gupta , Hsiangfu Yu , Lexing Ying , Inderjit Dhillon