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Reinforcement learning based adaptive/approximate dynamic programming (ADP) is a powerful technique to determine an approximate optimal controller for a dynamical system. These methods bypass the need to analytically solve the nonlinear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-24 Xuefeng Bao , Zhi-Hong Mao , Nitin Sharma

Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-18 Belhal Karimi , Blazej Miasojedow , Eric Moulines , Hoi-To Wai

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a method to control nonlinear systems with guaranteed stability and constraint satisfaction but suffers from high computation times. Approximate MPC (AMPC) with neural networks (NNs) has emerged to address…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-24 Henrik Hose , Alexander Gräfe , Sebastian Trimpe

In this work, we propose to apply trust region optimization to deep reinforcement learning using a recently proposed Kronecker-factored approximation to the curvature. We extend the framework of natural policy gradient and propose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-21 Yuhuai Wu , Elman Mansimov , Shun Liao , Roger Grosse , Jimmy Ba

After presenting Actor Critic Methods (ACM), we show ACM are control variate estimators. Using the projection theorem, we prove that the Q and Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) methods are optimal in the sense of the $L^2$ norm for the control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Eric Benhamou

Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to either the less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Shaocong Ma , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

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

Despite the promising results achieved, state-of-the-art interactive reinforcement learning schemes rely on passively receiving supervision signals from advisor experts, in the form of either continuous monitoring or pre-defined rules,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shunyu Liu , Kaixuan Chen , Na Yu , Jie Song , Zunlei Feng , Mingli Song

Although multi-agent reinforcement learning can tackle systems of strategically interacting entities, it currently fails in scalability and lacks rigorous convergence guarantees. Crucially, learning in multi-agent systems can become…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2018-03-15 David Mguni , Joel Jennings , Enrique Munoz de Cote

We introduce a sequence-conditioned critic for Soft Actor--Critic (SAC) that models trajectory context with a lightweight Transformer and trains on aggregated $N$-step targets. Unlike prior approaches that (i) score state--action pairs in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Dong Tian , Onur Celik , Gerhard Neumann

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

We study a remote estimation setup with an autoregressive (AR) Markov process, a sensor, and a remote estimator. The sensor observes the process and sends encoded observations to the estimator as packets over an unreliable communication…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-29 Manali Dutta , Rahul Singh , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj

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 introduces Team-Attention-Actor-Critic (TAAC), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to enhance multi-agent collaboration in cooperative environments. TAAC employs a Centralized Training/Centralized Execution scheme…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Hugo Garrido-Lestache Belinchon , Jeremy Kedziora

The finite-time convergence of off-policy TD learning has been comprehensively studied recently. However, such a type of convergence has not been well established for off-policy TD learning in the multi-agent setting, which covers broader…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Rongrong Chen

Learning-based methods have enabled robots to acquire bio-inspired movements with increasing levels of naturalness and adaptability. Among these, Imitation Learning (IL) has proven effective in transferring complex motion patterns from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nayari Marie Lessa , Melya Boukheddimi , Frank Kirchner

Consider composite nonconvex optimization problems where the objective function consists of a smooth nonconvex term (with Lipschitz-continuous gradient) and a convex (possibly nonsmooth) term. Existing parameter-free methods for such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-08 Zilong Ye , Shiqian Ma , Junfeng Yang , Danqing Zhou

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Samuel Neumann , Sungsu Lim , Ajin Joseph , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

The exploration mechanism used by a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent plays a key role in determining its sample efficiency. Thus, improving over random exploration is crucial to solve long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Andrey Kurenkov , Ajay Mandlekar , Roberto Martin-Martin , Silvio Savarese , Animesh Garg