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Related papers: Actor-Critics Can Achieve Optimal Sample Efficienc…

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Reinforcement learning (RL) agents can leverage batches of previously collected data to extract a reasonable control policy. An emerging issue in this offline RL setting, however, is that the bootstrapping update underlying many of our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Chenjun Xiao , Han Wang , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

Offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning (RL) provides an effective means of leveraging an offline pre-trained policy as initialization to improve performance rapidly with limited online interactions. Recent studies often design…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Qin-Wen Luo , Ming-Kun Xie , Ye-Wen Wang , Sheng-Jun Huang

Despite definite success in deep reinforcement learning problems, actor-critic algorithms are still confronted with sample inefficiency in complex environments, particularly in tasks where efficient exploration is a bottleneck. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Philippe Preux , Matthieu Geist

As an important algorithm in deep reinforcement learning, advantage actor critic (A2C) has been widely succeeded in both discrete and continuous control tasks with raw pixel inputs, but its sample efficiency still needs to improve more. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Yuan Wang , Chunyuan Zhang , Tianzong Yu , Meng Ma

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Control contraction metrics (CCMs) provide a framework to co-synthesize a controller and a corresponding contraction metric -- a positive-definite Riemannian metric under which a closed-loop system is guaranteed to be incrementally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Minjae Cho , Hiroyasu Tsukamoto , Huy Trong Tran

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Anas Barakat , Pascal Bianchi , Julien Lehmann

Actor-critic methods have been central to many of the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. The most common approach is to use symmetric architectures, whereby both actor and critic have the same network topology and number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Olya Mastikhina , Dhruv Sreenivas , Pablo Samuel Castro

Training critiquing language models to assess and provide feedback on model outputs is a promising way to improve LLMs for complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches typically rely on stronger supervisors for annotating critique…

Intelligent robots provide a new insight into efficiency improvement in industrial and service scenarios to replace human labor. However, these scenarios include dense and dynamic obstacles that make motion planning of robots challenging.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Chengmin Zhou , Bingding Huang , Pasi Fränti

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods in offline domains without additional online data collection, such as mobile health applications. Most of existing policy optimization algorithms in the computer science literature are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Yuan Le , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

An off policy reinforcement learning based control strategy is developed for the optimal tracking control problem to achieve the prescribed performance of full states during the learning process. The optimal tracking control problem is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-02 C. Li , Y. Wang , F. Liu , M. Buss

A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Baturay Saglam , Furkan B. Mutlu , Dogan C. Cicek , Suleyman S. Kozat

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

We develop a new policy gradient and actor-critic algorithm for solving mean-field control problems within a continuous time reinforcement learning setting. Our approach leverages a gradient-based representation of the value function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-11 Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a significant challenge of distribution shift. Model-free offline RL penalizes the Q value for out-of-distribution (OOD) data or constrains the policy closed to the behavior policy to tackle this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Xiao-Yin Liu , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Guotao Li , Hao Li , Mei-Jiang Gui , Tian-Yu Xiang , De-Xing Huang , Zeng-Guang Hou

In this paper, we present a novel algorithm named synchronous integral Q-learning, which is based on synchronous policy iteration, to solve the continuous-time infinite horizon optimal control problems of input-affine system dynamics. The…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-05-20 Lei Guo , Han Zhao