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

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We revisit the standard formulation of tabular actor-critic algorithm as a two time-scale stochastic approximation with value function computed on a faster time-scale and policy computed on a slower time-scale. This emulates policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Shalabh Bhatnagar , Vivek S. Borkar , Soumyajit Guin

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

Deterministic policy gradient algorithms are foundational for actor-critic methods in controlling continuous systems, yet they often encounter inaccuracies due to their dependence on the derivative of the critic's value estimates with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Baturay Saglam , Dionysis Kalogerias

In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-28 Weijian Li , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Learning-based methods have enabled robots to acquire bio-inspired movements with increasing levels of naturalness and adaptability. Among these, Imitation Learning (IL) has proven effective in transferring complex motion patterns from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nayari Marie Lessa , Melya Boukheddimi , Frank Kirchner

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful framework to address the discrepancy between loss functions used during training and the final evaluation metrics to be used at test time. When applied to neural Machine Translation (MT), it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Julia Ive , Zixu Wang , Marina Fomicheva , Lucia Specia

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Debidatta Dwibedi , Sergey Levine , Jonathan Tompson

Continuous-time stochastic control with time-inhomogeneous jump-diffusion dynamics is central in finance and economics, but computing optimal policies is difficult under explicit time dependence, discontinuous shocks, and high…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Liya Guo , Ruimeng Hu , Xu Yang , Yi Zhu

Machine learning techniques for the solution of inverse problems have become an attractive approach in the last decade, while their theoretical foundations are still in their infancy. In this chapter we want to pursue the study of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-12-10 Martin Burger , Samira Kabri , Gitta Kutyniok , Yunseok Lee , Lukas Weigand

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…

Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Sajad Khodadadian , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg , Siva Theja Maguluri

Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods with entropy regularization achieve impressive empirical success in reinforcement learning problems with large state-action spaces. However, their convergence properties and the impact of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Semih Cayci , Niao He , R. Srikant

Federated reinforcement learning (FRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling multiple agents to collaborate and learn a shared policy adaptable across heterogeneous environments. Among the various reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Ye Zhu , Xiaowen Gong

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

A reliable critic is central to on-policy actor-critic learning. But it becomes challenging to learn a reliable critic in a multi-agent sparse reward scenario due to two factors: 1) The joint action space grows exponentially with the number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Kinal Mehta , Anuj Mahajan , Pawan Kumar

In Reinforcement Learning the Q-learning algorithm provably converges to the optimal solution. However, as others have demonstrated, Q-learning can also overestimate the values and thereby spend too long exploring unhelpful states. Double…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 David Barber

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

Motivated by the recent applications of game-theoretical learning techniques to the design of distributed control systems, we study a class of control problems that can be formulated as potential games with continuous action sets, and we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-12-03 Steven Perkins , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , David S. Leslie

In this paper, we develop a novel variant of off-policy natural actor-critic algorithm with linear function approximation and we establish a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, outperforming all the previously known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Zaiwei Chen , Sajad Khodadadian , Siva Theja Maguluri

In this paper, we propose a max-min entropy framework for reinforcement learning (RL) to overcome the limitation of the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm implementing the maximum entropy RL in model-free sample-based learning. Whereas the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung