English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimization Solution Functions as Deterministic P…

200 papers

Inspired by the recent successes of Inverse Optimization (IO) across various application domains, we propose a novel offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) algorithm for continuous state and action spaces, leveraging the convex loss function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ioannis Dimanidis , Tolga Ok , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) is effective for sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty, it still fails to thrive in real-world systems where risk or safety is a binding constraint. In this paper, we formulate the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Debabrota Basu

Automated vehicle control using reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted significant attention due to its potential to learn driving policies through environment interaction. However, RL agents often face training challenges in sample…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Zhihao Zhang , Chengyang Peng , Ekim Yurtsever , Keith A. Redmill

In this work, we propose Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic (BAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm. BAC mathematically formulates the behavior of the policy through autoencoders by providing an accurate estimation of how frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Ammar Fayad , Majd Ibrahim

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are vulnerable to adversarial disturbances, which can deteriorate task performance or compromise safety specifications. Existing methods either address safety requirements under the assumption of no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Yunan Wang , Yujie Yang , Shengbo Eben Li

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

Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Prateek Jain , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy by using pre-collected datasets, to maximize cumulative rewards. However, offline reinforcement learning suffers challenges due to the distributional shift between the learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yunkai Gao , Jiaming Guo , Fan Wu , Rui Zhang

Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Tanuja Joshi , Hariprasad Kodamana , Harikumar Kandath , Niket Kaisare

Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

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

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm, essentially based on entropy regularization. SAC trains a policy by maximizing the trade-off between expected return and entropy (randomness in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman

Behavior constrained policy optimization has been demonstrated to be a successful paradigm for tackling Offline Reinforcement Learning. By exploiting historical transitions, a policy is trained to maximize a learned value function while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Jiachen Li , Edwin Zhang , Ming Yin , Qinxun Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang , William Yang Wang

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), function approximation errors are known to easily lead to the Q-value overestimations, thus greatly reducing policy performance. This paper presents a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Jingliang Duan , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yangang Ren , Bo Cheng

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) in low-data and risk-sensitive domains requires performant and flexible deployment policies that can readily incorporate constraints during deployment. One such class of policies are the semi-parametric H-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Harshit Sikchi , Wenxuan Zhou , David Held

Modern decision-making systems, from robots to web recommendation engines, are expected to adapt: to user preferences, changing circumstances or even new tasks. Yet, it is still uncommon to deploy a dynamically learning agent (rather than a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shengpu Tang , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Dipendra Misra , Alex Lamb , John Langford , Paul Mineiro , Sebastian Kochman