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This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Establishing robust policies is essential to counter attacks or disturbances affecting deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents. Recent studies explore state-adversarial robustness and suggest the potential lack of an optimal robust policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Haoran Li , Zicheng Zhang , Wang Luo , Congying Han , Yudong Hu , Tiande Guo , Shichen Liao

Reliable long-horizon value prediction is difficult in offline reinforcement learning because fitted value methods combine bootstrapping, function approximation, and distribution shift, while standard guarantees often require Bellman…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Lars van der Laan , Nathan Kallus

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to challenging continuous control domains. However, poor sample efficiency prevents these methods from being widely used in real-world domains. This paper introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Sicen Li , Qinyun Tang , Yiming Pang , Xinmeng Ma , Gang Wang

Actor-critic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in continuous control tasks. However, they still suffer two nontrivial obstacles, i.e., low sample efficiency and overestimation bias. To this end, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Qing Li , Wengang Zhou , Zhenbo Lu , Houqiang Li

We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Aviral Kumar , Aurick Zhou , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

We introduce a class of variational actor-critic algorithms based on a variational formulation over both the value function and the policy. The objective function of the variational formulation consists of two parts: one for maximizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuhua Zhu , Lexing Ying

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Overestimation arising from selecting unseen actions during policy evaluation is a major challenge in offline reinforcement learning (RL). A minimalist approach in the single-agent setting -- adding behavior cloning (BC) regularization to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Woojun Kim , Katia Sycara

Most of the existing works for reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation (FA) focus on understanding the statistical complexity or regret bounds. However, the computation complexity of such approaches is far from being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Dingwen Kong , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for next-generation wireless networks, where online exploration is unsafe and large amounts of operational data can be reused across the model lifecycle. However, the behavior of…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Nicolas Helson , Pegah Alizadeh , Anastasios Giovanidis

Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Uğurcan Özalp

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Actor-Critic based approaches were among the first to address reinforcement learning in a general setting. Recently, these algorithms have gained renewed interest due to their generality, good convergence properties, and possible biological…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-09-17 D. Di Castro , R. Meir

This paper introduces the offline meta-reinforcement learning (offline meta-RL) problem setting and proposes an algorithm that performs well in this setting. Offline meta-RL is analogous to the widely successful supervised learning strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-22 Eric Mitchell , Rafael Rafailov , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

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

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in specific offline decision-making scenarios, yet its theoretical guarantees are still under development. Existing works on offline RL theory primarily emphasize a few trivial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Di Wu , Yuling Jiao , Li Shen , Haizhao Yang , Xiliang Lu