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Setting up and controlling optical systems is often a challenging and tedious task. The high number of degrees of freedom to control mirrors, lenses, or phases of light makes automatic control challenging, especially when the complexity of…

We propose a new policy iteration theory as an important extension of soft policy iteration and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), one of the most efficient model free algorithms for deep reinforcement learning. Supported by the new theory, arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng

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

The Job-Shop Scheduling Problem (JSP) and Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP), are canonical combinatorial optimization problems with wide-ranging applications in industrial operations. In recent years, many online reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Jesse van Remmerden , Zaharah Bukhsh , Yingqian Zhang

Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Weichen Li , Rati Devidze , Sophie Fellenz

Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yanwei Jia , Du Ouyang , Yufei Zhang

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

We introduce D2AC, a new model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to train expressive diffusion policies online effectively. At its core is a policy improvement objective that avoids the high variance of typical policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lunjun Zhang , Shuo Han , Hanrui Lyu , Bradly C Stadie

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

We present a Multi-task Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) Reinforcement Learning framework designed for open-system quantum control across diverse Hamiltonians, which learns optimal pulse sequences while simultaneously discovering problem-specific…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-27 Haftu W. Fentaw , Steve Campbell , Simon Caton

Deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have emerged as the leading framework for reinforcement learning in continuous control domains. However, most of these algorithms suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially in environments with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Rajarshi Banerjee , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Dhaval Parmar Udaybhai

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to control tasks associated with unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. In recent years, safe RL has been proposed to allow the safe execution of RL algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Austin Coursey , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Visual reinforcement learning is appealing for robotics but expensive -- off-policy methods are sample-efficient yet slow; on-policy methods parallelize well but waste samples. Recent work has shown that off-policy methods can train faster…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Abdulaziz Almuzairee , Henrik I. Christensen

Overestimation is a fundamental characteristic of model-free reinforcement learning (MF-RL), arising from the principles of temporal difference learning and the approximation of the Q-function. To address this challenge, we propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Ukjo Hwang , Songnam Hong

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have shown promise in solving sequential decision problems (SDPs) by simplifying them to static optimization problems and searching for the optimal policy parameters in a zeroth-order way. While these methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yuheng Lei , Yao Lyu , Guojian Zhan , Tao Zhang , Jiangtao Li , Jianyu Chen , Shengbo Eben Li , Sifa Zheng

Intelligent robots provide a new insight into efficiency improvement in industrial and service scenarios to replace human labor. However, these scenarios include dense and dynamic obstacles that make motion planning of robots challenging.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Chengmin Zhou , Bingding Huang , Pasi Fränti

In goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), sparse rewards present significant challenges, often obstructing efficient learning. Although multi-step GCRL can boost this efficiency, it can also lead to off-policy biases in target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Lisheng Wu , Ke Chen

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance. We provide evidence consistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Nathan Samuel de Lara , Florian Shkurti