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Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Olya Mastikhina , Dhruv Sreenivas , Pablo Samuel Castro

We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Discrete reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated exceptional performance in solving sequential decision tasks with discrete action spaces, such as Atari games. However, their effectiveness is hindered when applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yechen Zhang , Jian Sun , Gang Wang , Zhuo Li , Wei Chen

In this note, we consider infinite horizon optimal control problems with deterministic systems. Since exact solutions to these problems are often intractable, we propose a parallel model predictive control (MPC) method that provides an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-29 Yuchao Li , Aren Karapetyan , Niklas Schmid , John Lygeros , Karl H. Johansson , Jonas Mårtensson

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) works well when experience can be collected cheaply and model-based RL is effective when system dynamics can be modeled accurately. However, both assumptions can be violated in real world problems such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-07 Mohak Bhardwaj , Ankur Handa , Dieter Fox , Byron Boots

In cooperative stochastic games multiple agents work towards learning joint optimal actions in an unknown environment to achieve a common goal. In many real-world applications, however, constraints are often imposed on the actions that can…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Sai Koti Reddy Danda , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

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

Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular approach for trajectory optimization in practical robotics applications. MPC policies can optimize trajectory parameters under kinodynamic and safety constraints and provide guarantees on safety,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Returaj Burnwal , Anirban Santara , Nirav P. Bhatt , Balaraman Ravindran , Gaurav Aggarwal

This paper considers the problem of real-time control and learning in dynamic systems subjected to parametric uncertainties. We propose a combination of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based policy in the outer loop suitably chosen to ensure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Anuradha M. Annaswamy , Anubhav Guha , Yingnan Cui , Sunbochen Tang , Peter A. Fisher , Joseph E. Gaudio

Several recent works have focused on carrying out non-asymptotic convergence analyses for AC algorithms. Recently, a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm has been presented for the discounted cost setting in the look-up table case where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Automated driving at unsignalized intersections is challenging due to complex multi-vehicle interactions and the need to balance safety and efficiency. Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers structured constraint handling through…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Saeed Rahmani , Gözde Körpe , Zhenlin , Xu , Bruno Brito , Simeon Craig Calvert , Bart van Arem

Reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) offer complementary strengths, yet combining them at scale remains computationally challenging. We propose soft MPCritic, an RL-MPC framework that learns in (soft) value space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Thomas Banker , Nathan P. Lawrence , Ali Mesbah

While there has been substantial success for solving continuous control with actor-critic methods, simpler critic-only methods such as Q-learning find limited application in the associated high-dimensional action spaces. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Tim Seyde , Peter Werner , Wilko Schwarting , Igor Gilitschenski , Martin Riedmiller , Daniela Rus , Markus Wulfmeier

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that treats parameterized action distributions as actions, redefining the boundary between agent and environment. This reparameterization makes the new action space continuous,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jiamin He , A. Rupam Mahmood , Martha White

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Learning from data of past tasks can substantially improve the accuracy of mechatronic systems. Often, for fast and safe learning a model of the system is required. The aim of this paper is to develop a model-free approach for fast and safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-07-06 Maurice Poot , Jim Portegies , Tom Oomen

This paper proposes an off-line algorithm, called Recurrent Model Predictive Control (RMPC), to solve general nonlinear finite-horizon optimal control problems. Unlike traditional Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithms, it can make full…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-24 Zhengyu Liu , Jingliang Duan , Wenxuan Wang , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Ziyu Lin , Qi Sun , Bo Cheng

Model predictive control (MPC) is increasingly being considered for control of fast systems and embedded applications. However, the MPC has some significant challenges for such systems. Its high computational complexity results in high…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-28 Eivind Bøhn , Sebastien Gros , Signe Moe , Tor Arne Johansen