English
Related papers

Related papers: AFU: Actor-Free critic Updates in off-policy RL fo…

200 papers

During recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made successful incursions into complex decision-making applications such as robotics, autonomous driving or video games. Off-policy algorithms tend to be more sample-efficient than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Raphael Chekroun , Fabien Moutarde

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

Actor-Critic models are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that have demonstrated effectiveness across various robot learning tasks. While considerable research has focused on improving training stability and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Hanlan Yang , Itamar Mishani , Luca Pivetti , Zachary Kingston , Maxim Likhachev

Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-14 Yemi Okesanjo , Victor Kofia

\Ac{MPC} and \ac{RL} are two powerful control strategies with, arguably, complementary advantages. In this work, we show how actor-critic \ac{RL} techniques can be leveraged to improve the performance of \ac{MPC}. The \ac{RL} critic is used…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-07 Rudolf Reiter , Andrea Ghezzi , Katrin Baumgärtner , Jasper Hoffmann , Robert D. McAllister , Moritz Diehl

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman , Mohsen Zamani

Robotic manipulation remains challenging for reinforcement learning due to contact-rich dynamics, long horizons, and training instability. Although off-policy actor-critic algorithms such as SAC and TD3 perform well in simulation, they…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yu Zhang , Karl Mason

Biological agents learn and act intelligently in spite of a highly limited capacity to process and store information. Many real-world problems involve continuous control, which represents a difficult task for artificial intelligence agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Tailia Malloy , Chris R. Sims , Tim Klinger , Miao Liu , Matthew Riemer , Gerald Tesauro

In this paper, we provide finite-sample convergence guarantees for an off-policy variant of the natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithm based on Importance Sampling. In particular, we show that the algorithm converges to a global optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sajad Khodadadian , Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

This paper proposes an on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) control algorithm that solves the optimal regulation problem for a class of uncertain continuous-time nonlinear systems under user-defined state constraints. We formulate the safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-20 Soutrik Bandyopadhyay , Shubhendu Bhasin

In this work we present a novel extension of soft actor critic, a state of the art deep reinforcement algorithm. Our method allows us to combine traditional controllers with learned neural network policies. This combination allows us to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Sean Gillen , Marco Molnar , Katie Byl

In this paper, a continuous-time adaptive actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) controller is developed for drift-free nonlinear systems. Practical examples of such systems are image-based visual servoing (IBVS) and wheeled mobile robots…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-14 Ashwin P. Dani , Shubhendu Bhasin

Quantum computing has a superior advantage in tackling specific problems, such as integer factorization and Simon's problem. For more general tasks in machine learning, by applying variational quantum circuits, more and more quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-23 Qingfeng Lan

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

Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Philippe Preux , Matthieu Geist

A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Baturay Saglam , Furkan B. Mutlu , Dogan C. Cicek , Suleyman S. Kozat

In traditional reinforcement learning, an agent maximizes the reward collected during its interaction with the environment by approximating the optimal policy through the estimation of value functions. Typically, given a state s and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Shangda Li , Selina Bing , Steven Yang

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianxiong Li , Honglei Yin

Traditional reinforcement learning methods optimize agents without considering safety, potentially resulting in unintended consequences. In this paper, we propose an optimal actor-free policy that optimizes a risk-sensitive criterion based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Ruoqi Zhang , Jens Sjölund