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Related papers: Wasserstein Actor-Critic: Directed Exploration via…

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Conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, typically focused on estimating or maximizing expected returns, face challenges when refining offline pretrained models with online experiences. This paper introduces Generative Actor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Aoyang Qin , Deqian Kong , Wei Wang , Ying Nian Wu , Song-Chun Zhu , Sirui Xie

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

Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Tanuja Joshi , Hariprasad Kodamana , Harikumar Kandath , Niket Kaisare

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

The actor-critic RL is widely used in various robotic control tasks. By viewing the actor-critic RL from the perspective of variational inference (VI), the policy network is trained to obtain the approximate posterior of actions given the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Duo Xu , Faramarz Fekri

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an appealing formalism for learning control policies from experience. However, the classic active formulation of RL necessitates a lengthy active exploration process for each behavior, making it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ashvin Nair , Abhishek Gupta , Murtaza Dalal , Sergey Levine

Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Albert Wilcox , Ashwin Balakrishna , Jules Dedieu , Wyame Benslimane , Daniel S. Brown , Ken Goldberg

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

We present a novel $Q$-learning algorithm tailored to solve distributionally robust Markov decision problems where the corresponding ambiguity set of transition probabilities for the underlying Markov decision process is a Wasserstein ball…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Ariel Neufeld , Julian Sester

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

Uncertainty quantification is one of the central challenges for machine learning in real-world applications. In reinforcement learning, an agent confronts two kinds of uncertainty, called epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Takuya Kanazawa , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta

Actor-Critic models are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that have demonstrated effectiveness across various robot learning tasks. While considerable research has focused on improving training stability and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Hanlan Yang , Itamar Mishani , Luca Pivetti , Zachary Kingston , Maxim Likhachev

Wasserstein distributionally robust control (WDRC) is an effective method for addressing inaccurate distribution information about disturbances in stochastic systems. It provides various salient features, such as an out-of-sample…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-08 Astghik Hakobyan , Insoon Yang

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Brendan O'Donoghue

Deep actor-critic algorithms have reached a level where they influence everyday life. They are a driving force behind continual improvement of large language models through user feedback. However, their deployment in physical systems is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Bahareh Tasdighi , Manuel Haussmann , Yi-Shan Wu , Andres R. Masegosa , Melih Kandemir

An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has attracted much research attention recently. However, unlike its single-agent counterpart, many theoretical and algorithmic aspects of MARL have not been well-understood. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Siliang Zeng , Tianyi Chen , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Warm-Start reinforcement learning (RL), aided by a prior policy obtained from offline training, is emerging as a promising RL approach for practical applications. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that the performance of Warm-Start…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Hang Wang , Sen Lin , Junshan Zhang

Identification and analysis of symmetrical patterns in the natural world have led to significant discoveries across various scientific fields, such as the formulation of gravitational laws in physics and advancements in the study of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Dingyang Chen , Qi Zhang