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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

Precise tension control in roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing is difficult under varying operating conditions and process uncertainty. This paper presents a curriculum-based Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) controller for multi-section R2R tension…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-02 Shihao Li , Jiachen Li , Christopher Martin , Zijun Chen , Dongmei Chen , Wei Li

Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Yue Wu , Weitong Zhang , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Deep Actor-Critic algorithms, which combine Actor-Critic with deep neural network (DNN), have been among the most prevalent reinforcement learning algorithms for decision-making problems in simulated environments. However, the existing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Kexuan Wang , An Liu , Baishuo Lin

The actor-critic (AC) algorithm is a popular method to find an optimal policy in reinforcement learning. In the infinite horizon scenario, the finite-sample convergence rate for the AC and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Luca Grillotti , Maxence Faldor , Borja G. León , Antoine Cully

Reusing previously trained models is critical in deep reinforcement learning to speed up training of new agents. However, it is unclear how to acquire new skills when objectives and constraints are in conflict with previously learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Jaime S. Ide , Daria Mićović , Michael J. Guarino , Kevin Alcedo , David Rosenbluth , Adrian P. Pope

It is difficult to be able to imitate well in unknown states from a small amount of expert data and sampling data. Supervised learning methods such as Behavioral Cloning do not require sampling data, but usually suffer from distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-03 Daichi Nishio , Daiki Kuyoshi , Toi Tsuneda , Satoshi Yamane

In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Weiya Ren

Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Haque Ishfaq , Guangyuan Wang , Sami Nur Islam , Doina Precup

We present GuidedSAC, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that facilitates efficient exploration in vast state-action spaces. GuidedSAC leverages large language models (LLMs) as intelligent supervisors that provide action-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Hao Ma , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Huimu Wang

The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qinxun Bai , Yuxuan Han , Wei Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Harshat Kumar , Alec Koppel , Alejandro Ribeiro

While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Reza Asad , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani

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

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: high sample…

Most approaches to visual scene analysis have emphasised parallel processing of the image elements. However, one area in which the sequential nature of vision is apparent, is that of segmenting multiple, potentially similar and partially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-11 Nikita Araslanov , Constantin Rothkopf , Stefan Roth

Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Junfeng Wen , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Dale Schuurmans

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard for training legged robots, thanks to its robustness and scalability in massively parallel simulation environments like IsaacLab. However, its on-policy nature makes it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Gianluca Sabatini , Chenhao Li , Marco Hutter