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Large language model (LLM) agents -- LLMs that dynamically interact with an environment over long horizons -- have become an increasingly important area of research, enabling automation in complex tasks involving tool-use, web browsing, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Joey Hong , Kang Liu , Zhan Ling , Jiecao Chen , Sergey Levine

In recommendation systems, diversity and novelty are essential for capturing varied user preferences and encouraging exploration, yet many systems prioritize click relevance. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored to improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Jiin Woo , Alireza Bagheri Garakani , Tianchen Zhou , Zhishen Huang , Yan Gao

We study the adaption of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which is considered as a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, from continuous action space to discrete action space. We revisit vanilla discrete SAC and provide an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Haibin Zhou , Tong Wei , Zichuan Lin , junyou li , Junliang Xing , Yuanchun Shi , Li Shen , Chao Yu , Deheng Ye

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success, yet its deployment in real-world scenarios is often limited by vulnerability to environmental uncertainties. Distributionally robust RL (DR-RL) algorithms have been proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mingxuan Cui , Duo Zhou , Yuxuan Han , Grani A. Hanasusanto , Qiong Wang , Huan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Fast and efficient transport protocols are the foundation of an increasingly distributed world. The burden of continuously delivering improved communication performance to support next-generation applications and services, combined with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Raffaele Galliera , Alessandro Morelli , Roberto Fronteddu , Niranjan Suri

It is a popular belief that model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL, but in practice, it is not always true due to overweighed model errors. In complex and noisy settings, model-based RL tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Feiyang Pan , Jia He , Dandan Tu , Qing He

We present temporally abstract actor-critic (TAAC), a simple but effective off-policy RL algorithm that incorporates closed-loop temporal abstraction into the actor-critic framework. TAAC adds a second-stage binary policy to choose between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Haonan Yu , Wei Xu , Haichao Zhang

This research is concerned with the novel application and investigation of `Soft Actor Critic' (SAC) based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to control the cooling setpoint (and hence cooling loads) of a large commercial building to harness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-08 Anjukan Kathirgamanathan , Eleni Mangina , Donal P. Finn

Recent advances in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) have created unprecedented opportunities for intelligent automation, where a machine can autonomously learn an optimal policy for performing a given task. However, current deep RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Zohreh Raziei , Mohsen Moghaddam

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

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

Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Albert Wilcox , Ashwin Balakrishna , Jules Dedieu , Wyame Benslimane , Daniel S. Brown , Ken Goldberg

Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Max Qiushi Lin , Reza Asad , Kevin Tan , Haque Ishfaq , Csaba Szepesvari , Sharan Vaswani

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) improves sample efficiency by leveraging learned dynamics models for policy optimization. However, the effectiveness of methods such as actor-critic is often limited by compounding model errors,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Chengyang Gu , Yuxin Pan , Hui Xiong , Yize Chen

Many reinforcement learning methods achieve great success in practice but lack theoretical foundation. In this paper, we study the convergence analysis on the problem of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The global linear convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Zeyu Jin , Johann Michael Schmitt , Zaiwen Wen

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which have proven their efficacy in diverse domains, especially in solving continuous control problems. Improvement of exploration (action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman

In this paper, we study the continuous-time multi-asset mean-variance (MV) portfolio selection using a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, specifically the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm, in the time-varying financial market. A family…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-13 Yu Li , Yuhan Wu , Shuhua Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing tasks, yet they encounter challenges in complex decision-making scenarios that require long-term reasoning and alignment with high-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Heng Dong , Kefei Duan , Chongjie Zhang

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

We introduce D2AC, a new model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to train expressive diffusion policies online effectively. At its core is a policy improvement objective that avoids the high variance of typical policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lunjun Zhang , Shuo Han , Hanrui Lyu , Bradly C Stadie