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We propose a fully distributed actor-critic architecture, named Diff-DAC, with application to multitask reinforcement learning (MRL). During the learning process, agents communicate their value and policy parameters to their neighbours,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Sergio Valcarcel Macua , Ian Davies , Aleksi Tukiainen , Enrique Munoz de Cote

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…

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

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

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Goal Recognition aims to infer an agent's goal from a sequence of observations. Existing approaches often rely on manually engineered domains and discrete representations. Deep Recognition using Actor-Critic Optimization (DRACO) is a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-06 Ben Nageris , Felipe Meneguzzi , Reuth Mirsky

Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Uğurcan Özalp

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and its integration with deep learning have achieved impressive performance in various robotic control tasks, ranging from motion planning and navigation to end-to-end visual manipulation. However, stability is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Minghao Han , Lixian Zhang , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

Many studies have applied reinforcement learning to train a dialog policy and show great promise these years. One common approach is to employ a user simulator to obtain a large number of simulated user experiences for reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-24 Ryuichi Takanobu , Runze Liang , Minlie Huang

In this paper, we present a new intrinsically motivated actor-critic algorithm for learning continuous motor skills directly from raw visual input. Our neural architecture is composed of a critic and an actor network. Both networks receive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Muhammad Burhan Hafez , Cornelius Weber , Matthias Kerzel , Stefan Wermter

Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Quoc-Vinh Lai-Dang , Dongsoo Har

We propose A-Crab (Actor-Critic Regularized by Average Bellman error), a new practical algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) in complex environments with insufficient data coverage. Our algorithm combines the marginalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Hanlin Zhu , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao

A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Eric Graves , Ehsan Imani , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Rui Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

In decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, agents can aggregate information from one another to learn policies that maximize a team-average objective function. Despite the willingness to cooperate with others, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-27 Martin Figura , Yixuan Lin , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with learning a rewarding policy by executing another policy that gathers samples of experience. While the former policy (i.e. target policy) is rewarding but in-expressive (in most cases,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Anji Liu , Yitao Liang , Guy Van den Broeck

This work examines average-reward reinforcement learning with general policy parametrization. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) guarantees for this problem are either suboptimal or hindered by several challenges, including poor scalability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, growing demand variability, and evolving grid control strategies, accurate and efficient load modeling has become a critical yet challenging task. Traditional methods, such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-11 Ding Lin , Han Guo , Jianhui Wang , Meng Yue , Tianqiao Zhao