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Related papers: The Point to Which Soft Actor-Critic Converges

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Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Rui Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

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

Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jake Grigsby , Jin Yong Yoo , Yanjun Qi

We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Markus Holzleitner , Lukas Gruber , José Arjona-Medina , Johannes Brandstetter , Sepp Hochreiter

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

We describe a novel extension of soft actor-critics for hierarchical Deep Q-Networks (HDQN) architectures using mutual information metric. The proposed extension provides a suitable framework for encouraging explorations in such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Ari Azarafrooz , John Brock

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is one of the state-of-the-art off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that is within the maximum entropy based RL framework. SAC is demonstrated to perform very well in a list of continous control tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Zhenyang Shi , Surya P. N. Singh

We present an algorithm for learning an approximate action-value soft Q-function in the relative entropy regularised reinforcement learning setting, for which an optimal improved policy can be recovered in closed form. We use recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Jonas Degrave , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) is effective for sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty, it still fails to thrive in real-world systems where risk or safety is a binding constraint. In this paper, we formulate the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Debabrota Basu

Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

On error of value function inevitably causes an overestimation phenomenon and has a negative impact on the convergence of the algorithms. To mitigate the negative effects of the approximation error, we propose Error Controlled Actor-critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Xingen Gao , Fei Chao , Changle Zhou , Zhen Ge , Chih-Min Lin , Longzhi Yang , Xiang Chang , Changjing Shang

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

Quantum computing has a superior advantage in tackling specific problems, such as integer factorization and Simon's problem. For more general tasks in machine learning, by applying variational quantum circuits, more and more quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-23 Qingfeng Lan

We study the robustness of deep reinforcement learning algorithms against distribution shifts within contextual multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problems from the operations research domain. In this context, risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Tobias Enders , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

Two main families of reinforcement learning algorithms, Q-learning and policy gradients, have recently been proven to be equivalent when using a softmax relaxation on one part, and an entropic regularization on the other. We relate this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-27 Pierre H. Richemond , Brendan Maginnis

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

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

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

Soft Q-learning is a variation of Q-learning designed to solve entropy regularized Markov decision problems where an agent aims to maximize the entropy regularized value function. Despite its empirical success, there have been limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee