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A core challenge in policy optimization in competitive Markov decision processes is the design of efficient optimization methods with desirable convergence and stability properties. To tackle this, we propose competitive policy optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Manish Prajapat , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alexander Liniger , Yisong Yue , Anima Anandkumar

Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Mikoto Kudo , Takumi Tanabe , Akifumi Wachi , Youhei Akimoto

Computational advertising has been studied to design efficient marketing strategies that maximize the number of acquired customers. In an increased competitive market, however, a market leader (a leader) requires the acquisition of new…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Daisuke Hatano , Yuko Kuroki , Yasushi Kawase , Hanna Sumita , Naonori Kakimura , Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi

We introduce Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO), an actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. WPO can be derived as an approximation to Wasserstein gradient flow over the space of all policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 David Pfau , Ian Davies , Diana Borsa , Joao G. M. Araujo , Brendan Tracey , Hado van Hasselt

Constrained reinforcement learning has achieved promising progress in safety-critical fields where both rewards and constraints are considered. However, constrained reinforcement learning methods face challenges in striking the right…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jianmina Ma , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

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

Motivated by the omnipresence of hierarchical structures in many real-world applications, this study delves into the intricate realm of bi-level games, with a specific focus on exploring local Stackelberg equilibria as a solution concept.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-23 Marko Maljkovic , Gustav Nilsson , Nikolas Geroliminis

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

In reinforcement learning, off-policy actor-critic methods like DDPG and TD3 use deterministic policy gradients: the Q-function is learned from environment data, while the actor maximizes it via gradient ascent. We observe that in complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Ayush Jain , Norio Kosaka , Xinhu Li , Kyung-Min Kim , Erdem Bıyık , Joseph J. Lim

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

Morphology-control co-design concerns the coupled optimization of an agent's body structure and control policy. This problem exhibits a bi-level structure, where the control dynamically adapts to the morphology to maximize performance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yanning Dai , Yuhui Wang , Dylan R. Ashley , Jürgen Schmidhuber

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

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yulai Zhao , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Jason D. Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang

Policy optimization on high-dimensional continuous control tasks exhibits its difficulty caused by the large variance of the policy gradient estimators. We present the action subspace dependent gradient (ASDG) estimator which incorporates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Jiajin Li , Baoxiang Wang

This paper formulates a Stackelberg game between a coordination agent and participating homes to control the overall load consumption of a residential neighborhood. Each home optimizes a comfort-cost trade off to determine a load schedule…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-30 Erhan Can Ozcan , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

We propose a new variant of the strategic classification problem: a principal reveals a classifier, and $n$ agents report their (possibly manipulated) features to be classified. Motivated by real-world applications, our model crucially…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Safwan Hossain , Evi Micha , Yiling Chen , Ariel Procaccia

Competitive multi-agent reinforcement learning in imperfect-information games requires agents to act under partial observability and against adversarial opponents, necessitating stochastic policies. While self-play reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Zhiyuan Fan , Gabriele Farina

Motivated by the increasing attention to overall social benefits in networked multi-agent systems, this paper investigates an optimization problem building on noncooperative games under high-level regulation, which can be formulated in a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Kaixin Du , Min Meng , Xiaoming Hu

Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Niklas Lauffer , Ameesh Shah , Micah Carroll , Sanjit A. Seshia , Stuart Russell , Michael Dennis