English
Related papers

Related papers: Warm-Start Actor-Critic: From Approximation Error …

200 papers

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

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

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

Incorporating demonstration data into reinforcement learning (RL) can greatly accelerate learning, but existing approaches often assume demonstrations are optimal and fully aligned with the target task. In practice, demonstrations are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Finn Rietz , Pedro Zuidberg dos Martires , Johannes Andreas Stork

This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Niao He , Lihong Li , Le Song

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

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms still lack trust in practice due to the risk that the learned policy performs worse than the original policy that generated the dataset or behaves in an unexpected way that is unfamiliar to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Thomas Runkler

The modern paradigm in machine learning involves pre-training on diverse data, followed by task-specific fine-tuning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this translates to learning via offline RL on a diverse historical dataset, followed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Zhiyuan Zhou , Andy Peng , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

For reinforcement learning (RL), it is challenging for an agent to master a task that requires a specific series of actions due to sparse rewards. To solve this problem, reverse curriculum generation (RCG) provides a reverse expansion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-05 Zih-Yun Chiu , Yi-Lin Tuan , Hung-yi Lee , Li-Chen Fu

Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang

Actor-critic methods can achieve incredible performance on difficult reinforcement learning problems, but they are also prone to instability. This is partly due to the interaction between the actor and critic during learning, e.g., an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Simone Parisi , Voot Tangkaratt , Jan Peters , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

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 paper proposes a step toward approximate Bayesian inference in on-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning. It is implemented through three changes to the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm: (1) applying a ReLU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Andrew Jesson , Chris Lu , Gunshi Gupta , Nicolas Beltran-Velez , Angelos Filos , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Yarin Gal

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to be effective at learning control from experience. However, RL typically requires a large amount of online interaction with the environment. This limits its applicability to real-world settings,…

Scaling critic capacity is a promising direction for improving off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). However, recent work shows that larger critics are prone to overfitting and instability in replay-based bootstrapped training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuan Zhuang , Yuexin Bian , Sihong He , Jie Feng , Qing Su , Songyang Han , Jonathan Petit , Shihao Ji , Yuanyuan Shi , Fei Miao

In cooperative stochastic games multiple agents work towards learning joint optimal actions in an unknown environment to achieve a common goal. In many real-world applications, however, constraints are often imposed on the actions that can…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Sai Koti Reddy Danda , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a theoretical framework for continuously improving an agent's behavior via trial and error. However, efficiently learning policies from scratch can be very difficult, particularly for tasks with…

Catastrophic forgetting has a serious impact in reinforcement learning, as the data distribution is generally sparse and non-stationary over time. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether pseudorehearsal can increase performance…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Marochko Vladimir , Leonard Johard , Manuel Mazzara

Large language model (LLM) agents -- LLMs that dynamically interact with an environment over long horizons -- have become an increasingly important area of research, enabling automation in complex tasks involving tool-use, web browsing, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Joey Hong , Kang Liu , Zhan Ling , Jiecao Chen , Sergey Levine