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We study policy gradient for mean-field control in continuous time in a reinforcement learning setting. By considering randomised policies with entropy regularisation, we derive a gradient expectation representation of the value function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-14 Noufel Frikha , Maximilien Germain , Mathieu Laurière , Huyên Pham , Xuanye Song

Most previous studies on multi-agent reinforcement learning focus on deriving decentralized and cooperative policies to maximize a common reward and rarely consider the transferability of trained policies to new tasks. This prevents such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Heechang Ryu , Hayong Shin , Jinkyoo Park

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…

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those involving sparse rewards. While action chunking is a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, using RL to directly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Jiarui Yang , Bin Zhu , Jingjing Chen , Yu-Gang Jiang

Reinforcement learning has proven its power on various occasions. However, its performance is not always guaranteed when system dynamics change. Instead, it largely relies on users' empirical experience. For reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jingyi Liu , Jian Guo , Eberhard Gill

Deep reinforcement learning methods have shown great performance on many challenging cooperative multi-agent tasks. Two main promising research directions are multi-agent value function decomposition and multi-agent policy gradients. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Yuan Pu , Shaochen Wang , Rui Yang , Xin Yao , Bin Li

Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani

We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

Applications designed for entertainment and other non-instrumental purposes are challenging to optimize because the relationships between system parameters and user experience can be unclear. Ideally, we would crowdsource these design…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Alan Medlar , Jing Li , Yang Liu , Dorota Glowacka

Cooperative multi-agent systems can be naturally used to model many real world problems, such as network packet routing and the coordination of autonomous vehicles. There is a great need for new reinforcement learning methods that can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Jakob Foerster , Gregory Farquhar , Triantafyllos Afouras , Nantas Nardelli , Shimon Whiteson

Actor-Critic models are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that have demonstrated effectiveness across various robot learning tasks. While considerable research has focused on improving training stability and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Hanlan Yang , Itamar Mishani , Luca Pivetti , Zachary Kingston , Maxim Likhachev

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Risk-aware Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms like SAC and TD3 were shown empirically to outperform their risk-neutral counterparts in a variety of continuous-action tasks. However, the theoretical basis for the pessimistic objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to serve as general-purpose tools for various language-based tasks. Recent works have demonstrated that the efficacy of such models can be improved through iterative dialog…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Andrew Estornell , Jean-Francois Ton , Yuanshun Yao , Yang Liu

Exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning is a challenging problem, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We propose a general method for efficient exploration by sharing experience amongst agents. Our proposed algorithm,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Filippos Christianos , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to challenging continuous control domains. However, poor sample efficiency prevents these methods from being widely used in real-world domains. This paper introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Sicen Li , Qinyun Tang , Yiming Pang , Xinmeng Ma , Gang Wang

The wide popularity of short videos on social media poses new opportunities and challenges to optimize recommender systems on the video-sharing platforms. Users sequentially interact with the system and provide complex and multi-faceted…

We prove that a single-layer neural network trained with the online actor critic algorithm converges in distribution to a random ordinary differential equation (ODE) as the number of hidden units and the number of training steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Samuel Chun-Hei Lam , Justin Sirignano , Ziheng Wang

We explore deep reinforcement learning methods for multi-agent domains. We begin by analyzing the difficulty of traditional algorithms in the multi-agent case: Q-learning is challenged by an inherent non-stationarity of the environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Ryan Lowe , Yi Wu , Aviv Tamar , Jean Harb , Pieter Abbeel , Igor Mordatch