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The sim-to-real gap, where agents trained in a simulator face significant performance degradation during testing, is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Extansive works adopt the framework of distributionally robust RL, to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-12 Zewu Zheng , Yuanyuan Lin

A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Baturay Saglam , Furkan B. Mutlu , Dogan C. Cicek , Suleyman S. Kozat

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) -- where multiple agents learn to interact in a shared dynamic environment -- permeates across a wide range of critical applications. While there has been substantial progress on understanding the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Shicong Cen , Yuejie Chi , Simon S. Du , Lin Xiao

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and conversational abilities, but ensuring reliable behavior in multi-turn interactions remains challenging. In many real-world applications, agents must succeed in one-shot settings…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Shuli Jiang , Zhaoyang Zhang , Yi Zhang , Shuo Yang , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Linear two-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) scheme is an important class of algorithms which has become popular in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for the policy evaluation problem. Recently, a number of works have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-05 Maxim Kaledin , Eric Moulines , Alexey Naumov , Vladislav Tadic , Hoi-To Wai

Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Jongseong Chae , Jongeui Park , Yongjae Shin , Gyeongmin Kim , Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

The finite-time convergence of off-policy TD learning has been comprehensively studied recently. However, such a type of convergence has not been well established for off-policy TD learning in the multi-agent setting, which covers broader…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Rongrong Chen

We consider the task of estimating a structural model of dynamic decisions by a human agent based upon the observable history of implemented actions and visited states. This problem has an inherent nested structure: in the inner problem, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Siliang Zeng , Mingyi Hong , Alfredo Garcia

We propose A-Crab (Actor-Critic Regularized by Average Bellman error), a new practical algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) in complex environments with insufficient data coverage. Our algorithm combines the marginalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Hanlin Zhu , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao

In this paper, we provide finite-sample convergence guarantees for an off-policy variant of the natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithm based on Importance Sampling. In particular, we show that the algorithm converges to a global optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sajad Khodadadian , Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

Hyper-parameter optimization is a crucial problem in machine learning as it aims to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in any model. Great efforts have been made in this field, such as random search, grid search, Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Chaoyue Liu , Yulai Zhang

We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for deep reinforcement learning that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization of deep neural network controllers. We present asynchronous variants of four standard…

Deterministic-policy actor-critic algorithms for continuous control improve the actor by plugging its actions into the critic and ascending the action-value gradient, which is obtained by chaining the actor's Jacobian matrix with the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Pierluca D'Oro , Wojciech Jaśkowski

In this paper, we propose actor-director-critic, a new framework for deep reinforcement learning. Compared with the actor-critic framework, the director role is added, and action classification and action evaluation are applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Zongwei Liu , Yonghong Song , Yuanlin Zhang

We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Sumitra Ganesh , Alec Koppel

Asymmetric actor-critic methods are widely used in partially observable reinforcement learning, but typically assume full state observability to condition the critic during training, which is often unrealistic in practice. We introduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Daniel Ebi , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Klemens Böhm

This work considers the problem of learning cooperative policies in multi-agent settings with partially observable and non-stationary environments without a communication channel. We focus on improving information sharing between agents and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Eshagh Kargar , Ville Kyrki