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Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Aditya Mahajan

We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Mo Zhou , Jianfeng Lu

In this paper, we study large population multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of discrete-time linear-quadratic mean-field games (LQ-MFGs). Our setting differs from most existing work on RL for MFGs, in that we consider a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-10-02 Muhammad Aneeq uz Zaman , Kaiqing Zhang , Erik Miehling , Tamer Başar

Multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms have not been widely adopted in large scale environments with many agents as they often scale poorly with the number of agents. Using mean field theory to aggregate agents has been proposed as a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian , Matthew E. Taylor , Mark Crowley , Pascal Poupart

Optimizing dynamic risk with stochastic policies is challenging in both policy updates and value learning. The former typically requires transition perturbation, while the latter may rely on model-based approaches. To address these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yudong Luo , Erick Delage

The hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Liyuan Zheng , Tanner Fiez , Zane Alumbaugh , Benjamin Chasnov , Lillian J. Ratliff

Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution, where training is done in a centralized offline fashion, has become a popular solution paradigm in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. Many such methods take the form of actor-critic with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xueguang Lyu , Andrea Baisero , Yuchen Xiao , Christopher Amato

We present the development and analysis of a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to solve continuous-space mean field game (MFG) and mean field control (MFC) problems in a unified manner. The proposed approach pairs the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-07 Andrea Angiuli , Jean-Pierre Fouque , Ruimeng Hu , Alan Raydan

On-policy deep reinforcement learning remains a dominant paradigm for continuous control, yet standard implementations rely on Gaussian actors and relatively shallow MLP policies, often leading to brittle optimization when gradients are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yuexin Bian , Jie Feng , Tao Wang , Yijiang Li , Sicun Gao , Yuanyuan Shi

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

This study proposes the use of a social learning method to estimate a global state within a multi-agent off-policy actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) operating in a partially observable environment. We assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Ainur Zhaikhan , Ali H. Sayed

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

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which updates the model parameters by adding a local gradient times a learning rate at each step, is widely used in model training of machine learning algorithms such as neural networks. It is observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-01 Chang Xu , Tao Qin , Gang Wang , Tie-Yan Liu

In partially observable reinforcement learning, offline training gives access to latent information which is not available during online training and/or execution, such as the system state. Asymmetric actor-critic methods exploit such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Andrea Baisero , Christopher Amato

In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Weiya Ren

We consider a data-driven formulation of the classical discrete-time stochastic control problem. Our approach exploits the natural structure of many such problems, in which significant portions of the system are uncontrolled. Employing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-25 Boris Baros , Samuel N. Cohen , Christoph Reisinger

Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Ruofan Wu , Junmin Zhong , Jennie Si

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama