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Distributionally robust control (DRC) aims to effectively manage distributional ambiguity in stochastic systems. While most existing works address inaccurate distributional information in fully observable settings, we consider a partially…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-12-23 Astghik Hakobyan , Insoon Yang

In reinforcement learning (RL), function approximation errors are known to easily lead to the Q-value overestimations, thus greatly reducing policy performance. This paper presents a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Jingliang Duan , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yangang Ren , Bo Cheng

We propose a new policy iteration theory as an important extension of soft policy iteration and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), one of the most efficient model free algorithms for deep reinforcement learning. Supported by the new theory, arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng

Continuous control Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are known to suffer from estimation biases, leading to suboptimal policies. This paper introduces innovative methods in RL, focusing on addressing and exploiting estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Niccolò Turcato , Alberto Sinigaglia , Alberto Dalla Libera , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

Despite of its importance for safe machine learning, uncertainty quantification for neural networks is far from being solved. State-of-the-art approaches to estimate neural uncertainties are often hybrid, combining parametric models with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Joachim Sicking , Maram Akila , Maximilian Pintz , Tim Wirtz , Asja Fischer , Stefan Wrobel

Sample efficiency is a central property of effective deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Recent work has improved this through added complexity, such as larger models, exotic network architectures, and more complex algorithms, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Daniel Palenicek , Florian Vogt , Joe Watson , Ingmar Posner , Jan Peters

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a prominent approach to designing safe navigation systems of robots. Despite their popularity, current CBF-based methods exhibit some limitations: optimization-based safe control techniques…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Junjun Xie , Shuhao Zhao , Liang Hu , Huijun Gao

Causal Abstraction (CA) theory provides a principled framework for relating causal models that describe the same system at different levels of granularity while ensuring interventional consistency between them. Recent methods for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Yorgos Felekis , Theodoros Damoulas , Paris Giampouras

Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. The main players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients of neural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Recep Yusuf Bekci , Mehmet Gümüş

Cooperative multi-agent systems can be naturally used to model many real world problems, such as network packet routing and the coordination of autonomous vehicles. There is a great need for new reinforcement learning methods that can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Jakob Foerster , Gregory Farquhar , Triantafyllos Afouras , Nantas Nardelli , Shimon Whiteson

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

We present a multi-agent actor-critic method that aims to implicitly address the credit assignment problem under fully cooperative settings. Our key motivation is that credit assignment among agents may not require an explicit formulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Meng Zhou , Ziyu Liu , Pengwei Sui , Yixuan Li , Yuk Ying Chung

The two-time scale nature of SAC, which is an actor-critic algorithm, is characterised by the fact that the critic estimate has not converged for the actor at any given time, but since the critic learns faster than the actor, it ensures…

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

A fundamental issue in reinforcement learning algorithms is the balance between exploration of the environment and exploitation of information already obtained by the agent. Especially, exploration has played a critical role for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Ruihan Yang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

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

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques have drawn great attention in many challenging tasks, but their performance deteriorates dramatically when applied to real-world problems. Various methods, such as domain randomization, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Wangyang Yue , Yuan Zhou , Xiaochuan Zhang , Yuchen Hua , Zhiyuan Wang , Guang Kou

In offline reinforcement learning, it is necessary to manage out-of-distribution actions to prevent overestimation of value functions. One class of methods, the policy-regularized method, addresses this problem by constraining the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Linjiajie Fang , Ruoxue Liu , Jing Zhang , Wenjia Wang , Bing-Yi Jing

We study policy gradient methods for continuous-action, entropy-regularized reinforcement learning through the lens of Wasserstein geometry. Starting from a Wasserstein proximal update, we derive Wasserstein Proximal Policy Gradient (WPPG)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Zhaoyu Zhu , Shuhan Zhang , Rui Gao , Shuang Li