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

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The actor-critic (AC) reinforcement learning algorithms have been the powerhouse behind many challenging applications. Nevertheless, its convergence is fragile in general. To study its instability, existing works mostly consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Xuyang Chen , Jingliang Duan , Yingbin Liang , Lin Zhao

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

Two of the leading approaches for model-free reinforcement learning are policy gradient methods and $Q$-learning methods. $Q$-learning methods can be effective and sample-efficient when they work, however, it is not well-understood why they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 John Schulman , Xi Chen , Pieter Abbeel

The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qinxun Bai , Yuxuan Han , Wei Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

We present GuidedSAC, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that facilitates efficient exploration in vast state-action spaces. GuidedSAC leverages large language models (LLMs) as intelligent supervisors that provide action-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Hao Ma , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Huimu Wang

While there has been substantial success for solving continuous control with actor-critic methods, simpler critic-only methods such as Q-learning find limited application in the associated high-dimensional action spaces. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Tim Seyde , Peter Werner , Wilko Schwarting , Igor Gilitschenski , Martin Riedmiller , Daniela Rus , Markus Wulfmeier

We present a new approach to learn compressible representations in deep architectures with an end-to-end training strategy. Our method is based on a soft (continuous) relaxation of quantization and entropy, which we anneal to their discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-09 Eirikur Agustsson , Fabian Mentzer , Michael Tschannen , Lukas Cavigelli , Radu Timofte , Luca Benini , Luc Van Gool

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is considered the state-of-the-art algorithm in continuous action space settings. It uses the maximum entropy framework for efficiency and stability, and applies a heuristic temperature Lagrange term to tune the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Yaosheng Xu , Dailin Hu , Litian Liang , Stephen McAleer , Pieter Abbeel , Roy Fox

Deep Q Network (DQN) is a very successful algorithm, yet the inherent problem of reinforcement learning, i.e. the exploit-explore balance, remains. In this work, we introduce entropy regularization into DQN and propose SQN. We find that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Jingbin Liu , Shuai Liu , Xinyang Gu

Fast and efficient transport protocols are the foundation of an increasingly distributed world. The burden of continuously delivering improved communication performance to support next-generation applications and services, combined with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Raffaele Galliera , Alessandro Morelli , Roberto Fronteddu , Niranjan Suri

The actor-critic (AC) algorithm is a popular method to find an optimal policy in reinforcement learning. In the infinite horizon scenario, the finite-sample convergence rate for the AC and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

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

Pretraining reinforcement learning methods with demonstrations has been an important concept in the study of reinforcement learning since a large amount of computing power is spent on online simulations with existing reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Xiaoqin Zhang , Yunfei Li , Huimin Ma , Xiong Luo

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

Entropy augmented to reward is known to soften the greedy argmax policy to softmax policy. Entropy augmentation is reformulated and leads to a motivation to introduce an additional entropy term to the objective function in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Donghoon Lee

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Luca Grillotti , Maxence Faldor , Borja G. León , Antoine Cully

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms, empowered by neural networks, have had significant empirical success in recent years. However, most of the existing theoretical support for AC algorithms focuses on the case of linear function approximations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Michael I. Jordan , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

We generalize the existing principle of the maximum Shannon entropy in reinforcement learning (RL) to weighted entropy by characterizing the state-action pairs with some qualitative weights, which can be connected with prior knowledge,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Yizhou Zhao , Song-Chun Zhu

Regularization is one of the most important techniques in reinforcement learning algorithms. The well-known soft actor-critic algorithm is a special case of regularized policy iteration where the regularizer is chosen as Shannon entropy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Yunan Wang , Guojian Zhan , Jie Li , Shengbo Eben Li