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Related papers: PAC-Bayesian Soft Actor-Critic Learning

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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

The performance of deep reinforcement learning methods prone to degenerate when applied to environments with non-stationary dynamics. In this paper, we utilize the latent context recurrent encoders motivated by recent Meta-RL materials, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Yuan Pu , Shaochen Wang , Xin Yao , Bin Li

We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Niao He , Lihong Li , Le Song

Exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning is a challenging problem, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We propose a general method for efficient exploration by sharing experience amongst agents. Our proposed algorithm,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Filippos Christianos , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning. By combining off-policy updates with an actor-critic formulation, SAC achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Che Wang , Keith Ross

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose

Bayesian priors offer a compact yet general means of incorporating domain knowledge into many learning tasks. The correctness of the Bayesian analysis and inference, however, largely depends on accuracy and correctness of these priors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Mahdi MIlani Fard , Joelle Pineau , Csaba Szepesvari

This work presents a comprehensive analysis to regularize the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm with automatic temperature adjustment. The the policy evaluation, the policy improvement and the temperature adjustment are reformulated,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Ben You

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 actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Haque Ishfaq , Guangyuan Wang , Sami Nur Islam , Doina Precup

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is widely used in practical applications and is now one of the most relevant off-policy online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The technique of n-step returns is known to increase the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jakub Łyskawa , Jakub Lewandowski , Paweł Wawrzyński

Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance. We provide evidence consistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Nathan Samuel de Lara , Florian Shkurti

The ability to discover approximately optimal policies in domains with sparse rewards is crucial to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Bogdan Mazoure , Thang Doan , Audrey Durand , R Devon Hjelm , Joelle Pineau

Deep Actor-Critic algorithms, which combine Actor-Critic with deep neural network (DNN), have been among the most prevalent reinforcement learning algorithms for decision-making problems in simulated environments. However, the existing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Kexuan Wang , An Liu , Baishuo Lin

We present Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (DSAC), a distributional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that combines the strengths of distributional information of accumulated rewards and entropy-driven exploration from Soft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Xiaoteng Ma , Junyao Chen , Li Xia , Jun Yang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

As AI systems become increasingly autonomous, reliably aligning their decision-making with human preferences is essential. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) offers a promising approach to infer preferences from demonstrations. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Ondrej Bajgar , Dewi S. W. Gould , Jonathon Liu , Alessandro Abate , Konstantinos Gatsis , Michael A. Osborne

The oscillating performance of off-policy learning and persisting errors in the actor-critic (AC) setting call for algorithms that can conservatively learn to suit the stability-critical applications better. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Lingwei Zhu , Toshinori Kitamura , Takamitsu Matsubara

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin