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Related papers: SARC: Soft Actor Retrospective Critic

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Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

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

Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Yue Wu , Weitong Zhang , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Federated reinforcement learning (FRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling multiple agents to collaborate and learn a shared policy adaptable across heterogeneous environments. Among the various reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Ye Zhu , Xiaowen Gong

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

We present a novel extension to the family of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithms. We argue that based on the Maximum Entropy Principle, discrete SAC can be further improved via additional statistical constraints derived from a surrogate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Dexter Neo , Tsuhan Chen

ATARI is a suite of video games used by reinforcement learning (RL) researchers to test the effectiveness of the learning algorithm. Receiving only the raw pixels and the game score, the agent learns to develop sophisticated strategies,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Le Zhang , Yong Gu , Xin Zhao , Yanshuo Zhang , Shu Zhao , Yifei Jin , Xinxin Wu

We present temporally abstract actor-critic (TAAC), a simple but effective off-policy RL algorithm that incorporates closed-loop temporal abstraction into the actor-critic framework. TAAC adds a second-stage binary policy to choose between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Haonan Yu , Wei Xu , Haichao Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving complex decision-making and control tasks. However, many model-free RL algorithms experience performance degradation due to inaccurate value estimation, particularly the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Jingliang Duan , Wenxuan Wang , Liming Xiao , Jiaxin Gao , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Ya-Qin Zhang , Bo Cheng , Keqiang Li

It is difficult to be able to imitate well in unknown states from a small amount of expert data and sampling data. Supervised learning methods such as Behavioral Cloning do not require sampling data, but usually suffer from distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-03 Daichi Nishio , Daiki Kuyoshi , Toi Tsuneda , Satoshi Yamane

We present GuidedSAC, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that facilitates efficient exploration in vast state-action spaces. GuidedSAC leverages large language models (LLMs) as intelligent supervisors that provide action-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Hao Ma , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Huimu Wang

This paper introduces the Active-Importance-Sampling Actor-Critic (AISAC) algorithm, an extension of the Actor-Critic framework for reducing variance in policy gradient estimation. AISAC optimizes the behavior policy to minimize gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Majid Molaei , Gabor Paczolay , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Luca Grillotti , Maxence Faldor , Borja G. León , Antoine Cully

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhiwei Shang , Xinyi Yuan , Wenjun Huang , Yunduan Cui , Di Chen , Meixin Zhu

Balancing reward and safety in constrained reinforcement learning remains challenging due to poor generalization from sharp value minima and inadequate handling of heavy-tailed risk distribution. We introduce Safe Langevin Soft Actor-Critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mahesh Keswani , Samyak Jain , Raunak P. Bhattacharyya

Reinforcement learning algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, typically requiring significant manual effort to identify hyperparameters that perform well on a new domain. In this paper, we take a step towards…

As an important algorithm in deep reinforcement learning, advantage actor critic (A2C) has been widely succeeded in both discrete and continuous control tasks with raw pixel inputs, but its sample efficiency still needs to improve more. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Yuan Wang , Chunyuan Zhang , Tianzong Yu , Meng Ma

The effectiveness of credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with high-dimensional data is influenced by the success of representation learning via deep neural networks, and has implications for the sample efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Burcu Küçükoğlu , Sander Dalm , Marcel van Gerven

Deep Actor-Critic algorithms, which combine Actor-Critic with deep neural network (DNN), have been among the most prevalent reinforcement learning algorithms for decision-making problems in simulated environments. However, the existing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Kexuan Wang , An Liu , Baishuo Lin

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj