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Related papers: Deep Actor-Critics with Tight Risk Certificates

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Recent advances in Deep Machine Learning have shown promise in solving complex perception and control loops via methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning. However, guaranteeing safety for such learned deep policies has been a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Tom Hirshberg , Sai Vemprala , Ashish Kapoor

In this paper, we propose actor-director-critic, a new framework for deep reinforcement learning. Compared with the actor-critic framework, the director role is added, and action classification and action evaluation are applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Zongwei Liu , Yonghong Song , Yuanlin Zhang

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Generalization bounds for deep learning models are typically vacuous, not computable or restricted to specific model classes. In this paper, we tackle these issues by providing new disagreement-based certificates for the gap between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Mathieu Bazinet , Valentina Zantedeschi , Pascal Germain

This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Thomas Degris , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision problems to maximize the cumulative reward. One potential application is mobile health, where the goal is to promote the user's health through personalized interventions based on user…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-23 Gi-Soo Kim , Hyun-Joon Yang , Jane P. Kim

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

We study the robustness of deep reinforcement learning algorithms against distribution shifts within contextual multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problems from the operations research domain. In this context, risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Tobias Enders , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer

This paper investigates the problem of safety certification for black-box discrete-time stochastic systems, where both the system dynamics and disturbance distributions are unknown, and only sampled data are available. Under such limited…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-17 Taoran Wu , Dominik Wagner , Jingduo Pan , Luke Ong , Arvind Easwaran , Bai Xue

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing tasks, yet they encounter challenges in complex decision-making scenarios that require long-term reasoning and alignment with high-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Heng Dong , Kefei Duan , Chongjie Zhang

We introduce a modified version of the excess risk, which can be used to obtain tighter, fast-rate PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds. This modified excess risk leverages information about the relative hardness of data examples to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Felix Biggs , Benjamin Guedj

PAC-Bayes is a popular and efficient framework for obtaining generalization guarantees in situations involving uncountable hypothesis spaces. Unfortunately, in its classical formulation, it only provides guarantees on the expected risk of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Benjamin Leblanc , Pascal Germain

In this paper, we introduce an actor-critic algorithm called Deep Value Model Predictive Control (DMPC), which combines model-based trajectory optimization with value function estimation. The DMPC actor is a Model Predictive Control (MPC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Farbod Farshidian , David Hoeller , Marco Hutter

Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jake Grigsby , Jin Yong Yoo , Yanjun Qi

How to obtain good value estimation is one of the key problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current value estimation methods, such as DDPG and TD3, suffer from unnecessary over- or underestimation bias. In this paper, we explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jiafei Lyu , Xiaoteng Ma , Jiangpeng Yan , Xiu Li

In this paper we present a novel model checking approach to finite-time safety verification of black-box continuous-time dynamical systems within the framework of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning. The black-box dynamical…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-07-21 Bai Xue , Miaomiao Zhang , Arvind Easwaran , Qin Li

Previous research on PAC-Bayes learning theory has focused extensively on establishing tight upper bounds for test errors. A recently proposed training procedure called PAC-Bayes training, updates the model toward minimizing these bounds.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-22 Xitong Zhang , Avrajit Ghosh , Guangliang Liu , Rongrong Wang

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Ziheng Wang , Justin Sirignano

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-25 Esther Derman , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Shie Mannor