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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

This study evaluates the performance of Soft Actor Critic (SAC), Greedy Actor Critic (GAC), and Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC) in high-dimensional decision-making tasks using fully observable environments. The focus is on parametrized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Ubayd Bapoo , Clement N Nyirenda

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

Soft Actor-Critic is a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous action settings that is not applicable to discrete action settings. Many important settings involve discrete actions, however, and so here we derive an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-21 Petros Christodoulou

Online reinforcement learning is becoming increasingly important for aligning diffusion models with non-differentiable objectives. However, existing methods still face limitations in assigning fine-grained credit along denoising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhengyang Liang , Qihang Zhang , Ceyuan Yang

Existing methods for image captioning are usually trained by cross entropy loss, which leads to exposure bias and the inconsistency between the optimizing function and evaluation metrics. Recently it has been shown that these two issues can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-16 Junlong Gao , Shiqi Wang , Shanshe Wang , Siwei Ma , Wen Gao

Sample efficiency is a central property of effective deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Recent work has improved this through added complexity, such as larger models, exotic network architectures, and more complex algorithms, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Daniel Palenicek , Florian Vogt , Joe Watson , Ingmar Posner , Jan Peters

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose

Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Simon Ramstedt , Yann Bouteiller , Giovanni Beltrame , Christopher Pal , Jonathan Binas

We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient…

Actor-critic methods have achieved significant success in many challenging applications. However, its finite-time convergence is still poorly understood in the most practical single-timescale form. Existing works on analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Xuyang Chen , Lin Zhao

Risk-bounded motion planning is an important yet difficult problem for safety-critical tasks. While existing mathematical programming methods offer theoretical guarantees in the context of constrained Markov decision processes, they either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-05 Xin Huang , Meng Feng , Ashkan Jasour , Guy Rosman , Brian Williams

We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Navdeep Kumar , Priyank Agrawal , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

Adopting reasonable strategies is challenging but crucial for an intelligent agent with limited resources working in hazardous, unstructured, and dynamic environments to improve the system's utility, decrease the overall cost, and increase…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Qin Yang , Ramviyas Parasuraman

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Liyuan Zheng , Tanner Fiez , Zane Alumbaugh , Benjamin Chasnov , Lillian J. Ratliff

Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Rajarshi Banerjee , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Dhaval Parmar Udaybhai

Large deformations of organs, caused by diverse shapes and nonlinear shape changes, pose a significant challenge for medical image registration. Traditional registration methods need to iteratively optimize an objective function via a…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-03 Ziwei Luo , Jing Hu , Xin Wang , Shu Hu , Bin Kong , Youbing Yin , Qi Song , Xi Wu , Siwei Lyu

Reinforcement learning is well-studied under discrete actions. Integer actions setting is popular in the industry yet still challenging due to its high dimensionality. To this end, we study reinforcement learning under integer actions by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ting-Han Fan , Yubo Wang

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

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Samuel Neumann , Sungsu Lim , Ajin Joseph , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White