Related papers: Average-Reward Soft Actor-Critic
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…
For RL algorithms, appropriate entropy control is crucial to their effectiveness. To control the policy entropy, a commonly used method is entropy regularization, which is adopted in various popular RL algorithms including PPO, SAC and A3C.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments through interaction with the environment. In most real-world applications, however, a high number of interactions are infeasible. In…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
Deploying controllers trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robots can be challenging: RL relies on agents' policies being modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), which assume an inherently discrete passage of time. The use…
The reward signal plays a central role in defining the desired behaviors of agents in reinforcement learning (RL). Rewards collected from realistic environments could be perturbed, corrupted, or noisy due to an adversary, sensor error, or…
We show that the simplest actor-critic method -- a linear softmax policy updated with TD through interaction with a linear MDP, but featuring no explicit regularization or exploration -- does not merely find an optimal policy, but moreover…
In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…
Outstanding claim liabilities are revised repeatedly as claims develop, yet most modern reserving models are trained as one-shot predictors and typically learn only from settled claims. We formulate individual claims reserving as a…
Existing Maximum-Entropy (MaxEnt) Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods for continuous action spaces are typically formulated based on actor-critic frameworks and optimized through alternating steps of policy evaluation and policy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…
Reinforcement learning substantially improves pretrained language models, but it remains understudied why critic-free methods such as PPO and GRPO work as well as they do, and when they should provide the largest gains. We develop a…
Modern navigation algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning (RL) show promising efficiency and robustness. However, most deep RL algorithms operate in a risk-neutral manner, making no special attempt to shield users from relatively…
In this work, we study the credit assignment problem in reward augmented maximum likelihood (RAML) learning, and establish a theoretical equivalence between the token-level counterpart of RAML and the entropy regularized reinforcement…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Regularization…
We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…
Explaining the behaviour of intelligent agents learned by reinforcement learning (RL) to humans is challenging yet crucial due to their incomprehensible proprioceptive states, variational intermediate goals, and resultant unpredictability.…
In robotic systems, the performance of reinforcement learning depends on the rationality of predefined reward functions. However, manually designed reward functions often lead to policy failures due to inaccuracies. Inverse Reinforcement…
In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved impressive results in a wide range of complex tasks, but poor sample efficiency remains a major obstacle to real-world deployment. Soft actor-critic (SAC) mitigates this problem…