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Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques have drawn great attention in many challenging tasks, but their performance deteriorates dramatically when applied to real-world problems. Various methods, such as domain randomization, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Wangyang Yue , Yuan Zhou , Xiaochuan Zhang , Yuchen Hua , Zhiyuan Wang , Guang Kou

Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-13 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan

We consider the problem of detecting anomalies among a given set of processes using their noisy binary sensor measurements. The noiseless sensor measurement corresponding to a normal process is 0, and the measurement is 1 if the process is…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-02 Geethu Joseph , M. Cenk Gursoy , Pramod K. Varshney

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

In this paper, we introduce an actor-critic algorithm called Deep Value Model Predictive Control (DMPC), which combines model-based trajectory optimization with value function estimation. The DMPC actor is a Model Predictive Control (MPC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Farbod Farshidian , David Hoeller , Marco Hutter

This paper is concerned with the optimal kinematic control of a robot manipulator where the robot end effector position follows a task space trajectory. The joints are actuated with the desired velocity profile to achieve this task. This…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-08-07 Aiswarya Menon , Ravi Prakash , Laxmidhar Behera

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

Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers rigorous safety and performance guarantees but is computationally intensive. Approximate MPC (AMPC) aims to circumvent this drawback by learning a computationally cheaper surrogate policy. Common…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-19 Elias Milios , Kim P. Wabersich , Felix Berkel , Felix Gruber , Melanie N. Zeilinger

We propose a novel actor-critic algorithm with guaranteed convergence to an optimal policy for a discounted reward Markov decision process. The actor incorporates a descent direction that is motivated by the solution of a certain non-linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-30 Prashanth L. A. , H. L. Prasad , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Prakash Chandra

The actor-critic RL is widely used in various robotic control tasks. By viewing the actor-critic RL from the perspective of variational inference (VI), the policy network is trained to obtain the approximate posterior of actions given the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Duo Xu , Faramarz Fekri

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable empirical success by integrating deep neural networks into RL frameworks. However, these algorithms often require a large number of training samples and admit little…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Junhong Shen , Lin F. Yang

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL)-based backstepping control strategy to achieve fixed time consensus in nonlinear multi-agent systems with strict feedback dynamics. Agents exchange only output information with their…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-23 Aria Delshad , Maryam Babazadeh

This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Wesley Suttle , Zhuoran Yang , Kaiqing Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Tamer Basar , Ji Liu

We consider the estimation of the policy gradient in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) with a special class of structured policies that are finite-state controllers. We show that the gradient estimation can be done in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Huizhen Yu

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is widely used in practical applications and is now one of the most relevant off-policy online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The technique of n-step returns is known to increase the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jakub Łyskawa , Jakub Lewandowski , Paweł Wawrzyński

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning. By combining off-policy updates with an actor-critic formulation, SAC achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Che Wang , Keith Ross

We study the performance of asymptotic and approximate consensus algorithms under harsh environmental conditions. The asymptotic consensus problem requires a set of agents to repeatedly set their outputs such that the outputs converge to a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-06-28 Matthias Függer , Thomas Nowak , Manfred Schwarz

This paper presents the development and analysis of an asymptotically compatible (AC) unfitted finite element method for one-dimensional nonlocal elliptic interface problems. The proposed method achieves optimal error estimates through…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Haixia Dong , Ziqing Xie , Jiwei Zhang

This paper proposes a step toward approximate Bayesian inference in on-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning. It is implemented through three changes to the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm: (1) applying a ReLU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Andrew Jesson , Chris Lu , Gunshi Gupta , Nicolas Beltran-Velez , Angelos Filos , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Yarin Gal

We consider a discounted cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) policy optimization problem, in which an agent seeks to maximize a discounted cumulative reward subject to a number of constraints on discounted cumulative utilities.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-21 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg