English
Related papers

Related papers: Reinforcement Learning with Elastic Time Steps

200 papers

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

Autonomous driving with reinforcement learning (RL) has significant potential. However, applying RL in real-world settings remains challenging due to the need for safe, efficient, and robust learning. Incorporating human expertise into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Li Zeqiao , Wang Yijing , Wang Haoyu , Li Zheng , Li Peng , Liu Wenfei , Zuo Zhiqiang

Training Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in high-stakes applications might be too prohibitive due to the risk associated to exploration. Thus, the agent can only use data previously collected by safe policies. While previous work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Núria Armengol Urpí , Sebastian Curi , Andreas Krause

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

Learning new task-specific skills from a few trials is a fundamental challenge for artificial intelligence. Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) tackles this problem by learning transferable policies that support few-shot adaptation to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Zhizhou Ren , Anji Liu , Yitao Liang , Jian Peng , Jianzhu Ma

Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning makes optimal decisions dependent on system states observed by agents, but any uncertainty on the observations may mislead agents to take wrong actions. The Mean-Field Actor-Critic reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Ziyuan Zhou , Guanjun Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods work in discrete time. In order to apply RL to inherently continuous problems like robotic control, a specific time discretization needs to be defined. This is a choice between sparse time control, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Jakub Łyskawa , Paweł Wawrzyński

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

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

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

In this paper, we study the continuous-time multi-asset mean-variance (MV) portfolio selection using a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, specifically the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm, in the time-varying financial market. A family…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-13 Yu Li , Yuhan Wu , Shuhua Zhang

This paper proposes the Cooperative Soft Actor Critic (CSAC) method of enabling consecutive reinforcement learning agents to cooperatively solve a long time horizon multi-stage task. This method is achieved by modifying the policy of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Jordan Erskine , Chris Lehnert

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success, yet its deployment in real-world scenarios is often limited by vulnerability to environmental uncertainties. Distributionally robust RL (DR-RL) algorithms have been proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mingxuan Cui , Duo Zhou , Yuxuan Han , Grani A. Hanasusanto , Qiong Wang , Huan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Albert Wilcox , Ashwin Balakrishna , Jules Dedieu , Wyame Benslimane , Daniel S. Brown , Ken Goldberg

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to challenging continuous control domains. However, poor sample efficiency prevents these methods from being widely used in real-world domains. This paper introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Sicen Li , Qinyun Tang , Yiming Pang , Xinmeng Ma , Gang Wang

In this paper, we propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, called encoding distributional soft actor-critic (E-DSAC), for decision-making in autonomous driving. Unlike existing RL-based decision-making methods, E-DSAC is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Jingliang Duan , Yangang Ren , Fawang Zhang , Yang Guan , Dongjie Yu , Shengbo Eben Li , Bo Cheng , Lin Zhao

Adopting reasonable strategies is challenging but crucial for an intelligent agent with limited resources working in hazardous, unstructured, and dynamic environments to improve the system's utility, decrease the overall cost, and increase…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Qin Yang , Ramviyas Parasuraman

Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Yuyang Zhang , Yang Hu , Bo Dai , Na Li