Related papers: Mirror Descent Actor Critic via Bounded Advantage …
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…
We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes…
Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution, where agents are trained offline using centralized information but execute in a decentralized manner online, has gained popularity in the multi-agent reinforcement learning community. In…
The hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…
In the context of learning deterministic policies in continuous domains, we revisit an approach, which was first proposed in Continuous Actor Critic Learning Automaton (CACLA) and later extended in Neural Fitted Actor Critic (NFAC). This…
Uncertainties in transition dynamics pose a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), often resulting in performance degradation of trained policies when deployed on hardware. Many robust RL approaches follow two strategies:…
Actor-critic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in continuous control tasks. However, they still suffer two nontrivial obstacles, i.e., low sample efficiency and overestimation bias. To this end, we…
We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for deep reinforcement learning that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization of deep neural network controllers. We present asynchronous variants of four standard…
Recommender system plays a crucial role in modern E-commerce platform. Due to the lack of historical interactions between users and items, cold-start recommendation is a challenging problem. In order to alleviate the cold-start issue, most…
Interactive multimodal agents must convert raw visual observations into coherent sequences of language-conditioned actions -- a capability that current vision-language models (VLMs) still lack. Earlier reinforcement-learning (RL) efforts…
Decision-making for engineering systems can be efficiently formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) or a Partially Observable MDP (POMDP). Typical MDP and POMDP solution procedures utilize offline knowledge about the environment and…
This paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that leverages Frank-Wolfe policy optimization to address frame-level bit allocation for HEVC/H.265. Most previous RL-based approaches adopt the single-critic design, which weights…
We study model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary finite-horizon episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) without prior knowledge of the non-stationarity. We focus on the piecewise stationary (PS) setting, where both…
Batch Normalization (BN) has played a pivotal role in the success of deep learning by improving training stability, mitigating overfitting, and enabling more effective optimization. However, its adoption in deep reinforcement learning (DRL)…
This work addresses decentralized online optimization in non-stationary environments. A network of agents aim to track the minimizer of a global time-varying convex function. The minimizer evolves according to a known dynamics corrupted by…
Reinforcement learning has attracted great attention recently, especially policy gradient algorithms, which have been demonstrated on challenging decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we propose an active multi-step TD algorithm…
We discuss the problem of decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in this work. In our setting, the global state, action, and reward are assumed to be fully observable, while the local policy is protected as privacy by each…
Recently, interactive recommendation systems based on reinforcement learning have been attended by researchers due to the consider recommendation procedure as a dynamic process and update the recommendation model based on immediate user…
A reliable critic is central to on-policy actor-critic learning. But it becomes challenging to learn a reliable critic in a multi-agent sparse reward scenario due to two factors: 1) The joint action space grows exponentially with the number…
This paper introduces a novel reinforcement learning (RL) strategy designed to facilitate rapid autonomy transfer by utilizing pre-trained critic value functions from multiple environments. Unlike traditional methods that require extensive…