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Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Junfeng Wen , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Dale Schuurmans

Motivated by the emerging use of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in engineering applications such as networked robotics, swarming drones, and sensor networks, we investigate the policy evaluation problem in a fully decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-31 Jun Sun , Gang Wang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Qinmin Yang , Zaiyue Yang

Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

Non-stationarity is a fundamental challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents update their behaviour as they learn. Many theoretical advances in MARL avoid the challenge of non-stationarity by coordinating the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Bora Yongacoglu , Gürdal Arslan , Serdar Yüksel

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods have achieved state-of-the-art results on a range of multi-agent tasks. Yet, MARL algorithms typically require significantly more environment interactions than their single-agent…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Tom Danino , Nahum Shimkin

Decentralized cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) can be a versatile learning framework, particularly in scenarios where centralized training is either not possible or not practical. One of the critical challenges in…

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these methods in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Kamil Ciosek , Quan Vuong , Robert Loftin , Katja Hofmann

Although multi-agent reinforcement learning can tackle systems of strategically interacting entities, it currently fails in scalability and lacks rigorous convergence guarantees. Crucially, learning in multi-agent systems can become…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2018-03-15 David Mguni , Joel Jennings , Enrique Munoz de Cote

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 success of single-agent reinforcement learning, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) remains challenging due to complex interactions between agents. Motivated by decentralized applications such as sensor networks, swarm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Hoi-To Wai , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mingyi Hong

\Ac{MPC} and \ac{RL} are two powerful control strategies with, arguably, complementary advantages. In this work, we show how actor-critic \ac{RL} techniques can be leveraged to improve the performance of \ac{MPC}. The \ac{RL} critic is used…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-07 Rudolf Reiter , Andrea Ghezzi , Katrin Baumgärtner , Jasper Hoffmann , Robert D. McAllister , Moritz Diehl

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) commonly adopts centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE), where centralized critics leverage global information to guide decentralized actors. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Yan Wang , Ke Deng , Yongli Ren

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: high sample…

We study multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in a stochastic network of agents. The objective is to find localized policies that maximize the (discounted) global reward. In general, scalability is a challenge in this setting because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Yiheng Lin , Guannan Qu , Longbo Huang , Adam Wierman

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Ziheng Wang , Justin Sirignano

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

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…

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

Multi-agent actor-critic algorithms are an important part of the Reinforcement Learning paradigm. We propose three fully decentralized multi-agent natural actor-critic (MAN) algorithms in this work. The objective is to collectively find a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Prashant Trivedi , Nandyala Hemachandra

The performance of algorithms for decentralized optimization is affected by both the optimization error and the consensus error, the latter of which arises from the variation between agents' local models. Classically, algorithms employ…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-15 Aaron Fainman , Stefan Vlaski