English
Related papers

Related papers: Actor critic learning algorithms for mean-field co…

200 papers

Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Olya Mastikhina , Dhruv Sreenivas , Pablo Samuel Castro

We study the inverse optimal control problem in social sciences: we aim at learning a user's true cost function from the observed temporal behavior. In contrast to traditional phenomenological works that aim to learn a generative model to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Yichen Wang , Le Song , Hongyuan Zha

In many robotic applications, some aspects of the system dynamics can be modeled accurately while others are difficult to obtain or model. We present a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for continuous state and action spaces that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Tomoki Nishi , Prashant Doshi , Michael R. James , Danil Prokhorov

[Zhang, ICML 2018] provided the first decentralized actor-critic algorithm for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) that offers convergence guarantees. In that work, policies are stochastic and are defined on finite action spaces. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Antoine Grosnit , Desmond Cai , Laura Wynter

We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Anas Barakat , Pascal Bianchi , Julien Lehmann

We present an approach to training neural networks to generate sequences using actor-critic methods from reinforcement learning (RL). Current log-likelihood training methods are limited by the discrepancy between their training and testing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-06 Dzmitry Bahdanau , Philemon Brakel , Kelvin Xu , Anirudh Goyal , Ryan Lowe , Joelle Pineau , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alex X. Lee , Anusha Nagabandi , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms (MARL) have been demonstrated on complex tasks that require the coordination of a team of multiple agents to complete. Existing works have focused on sharing information between agents via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-18 Samir Wadhwania , Dong-Ki Kim , Shayegan Omidshafiei , Jonathan P. How

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

We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sanjeev Manivannan , Shuban V

Since the objective functions of reinforcement learning problems are typically highly nonconvex, it is desirable that policy gradient, the most popular algorithm, escapes saddle points and arrives at second-order stationary points. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Siqiao Mu , Diego Klabjan

This paper studies minimax optimization problems defined over infinite-dimensional function classes of overparameterized two-layer neural networks. In particular, we consider the minimax optimization problem stemming from estimating linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yuchen Zhu , Yufeng Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Xiaohong Chen

Actor-critic methods constitute a central paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), coupling policy evaluation with policy improvement. While effective across many domains, these methods rely on separate actor and critic networks, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Sumitra Ganesh , Alec Koppel

There is a growing interest in integrating machine learning techniques and optimization to solve challenging optimization problems. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning methodology for the job shop scheduling problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-22 Marta Monaci , Valerio Agasucci , Giorgio Grani

Tackling multi-agent learning problems efficiently is a challenging task in continuous action domains. While value-based algorithms excel in sample efficiency when applied to discrete action domains, they are usually inefficient when…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yasin Findik , S. Reza Ahmadzadeh

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

Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Max Qiushi Lin , Reza Asad , Kevin Tan , Haque Ishfaq , Csaba Szepesvari , Sharan Vaswani