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Reinforcement learning has been proven to be highly effective in handling complex control tasks. Traditional methods typically use unimodal distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, to model the output of value distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Tong Liu , Yinuo Wang , Xujie Song , Wenjun Zou , Liangfa Chen , Likun Wang , Bin Shuai , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

We present Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (DSAC), a distributional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that combines the strengths of distributional information of accumulated rewards and entropy-driven exploration from Soft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Xiaoteng Ma , Junyao Chen , Li Xia , Jun Yang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Haque Ishfaq , Guangyuan Wang , Sami Nur Islam , Doina Precup

The performance of deep reinforcement learning methods prone to degenerate when applied to environments with non-stationary dynamics. In this paper, we utilize the latent context recurrent encoders motivated by recent Meta-RL materials, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Yuan Pu , Shaochen Wang , Xin Yao , Bin Li

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

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard for training legged robots, thanks to its robustness and scalability in massively parallel simulation environments like IsaacLab. However, its on-policy nature makes it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Gianluca Sabatini , Chenhao Li , Marco Hutter

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alex X. Lee , Anusha Nagabandi , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Yuyang Zhang , Yang Hu , Bo Dai , Na Li

This paper proposes the Cooperative Soft Actor Critic (CSAC) method of enabling consecutive reinforcement learning agents to cooperatively solve a long time horizon multi-stage task. This method is achieved by modifying the policy of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Jordan Erskine , Chris Lehnert

Balancing reward and safety in constrained reinforcement learning remains challenging due to poor generalization from sharp value minima and inadequate handling of heavy-tailed risk distribution. We introduce Safe Langevin Soft Actor-Critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mahesh Keswani , Samyak Jain , Raunak P. Bhattacharyya

Adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (AIRL) stands as a cornerstone approach in imitation learning, yet it faces criticisms from prior studies. In this paper, we rethink AIRL and respond to these criticisms. Criticism 1 lies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yangchun Zhang , Qiang Liu , Weiming Li , Yirui Zhou

The effectiveness of credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with high-dimensional data is influenced by the success of representation learning via deep neural networks, and has implications for the sample efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Burcu Küçükoğlu , Sander Dalm , Marcel van Gerven

This research is concerned with the novel application and investigation of `Soft Actor Critic' (SAC) based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to control the cooling setpoint (and hence cooling loads) of a large commercial building to harness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-08 Anjukan Kathirgamanathan , Eleni Mangina , Donal P. Finn

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is widely used in practical applications and is now one of the most relevant off-policy online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The technique of n-step returns is known to increase the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jakub Łyskawa , Jakub Lewandowski , Paweł Wawrzyński

Deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have emerged as the leading framework for reinforcement learning in continuous control domains. However, most of these algorithms suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially in environments with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

This paper addresses a new interpretation of the traditional optimization method in reinforcement learning (RL) as optimization problems using reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Taisuke Kobayashi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in solving complex sequential decision-making problems. However, its application to safety-critical physical systems remains constrained by the lack of stability guarantees.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-19 Dhruv S. Kushwaha , Zoleikha A. Biron

This work extends an established critic match loss landscape visualization method from online to off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to reveal the optimization geometry behind critic learning. Off-policy RL differs from stepwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jingyi Liu , Jian Guo , Eberhard Gill

Deep reinforcement learning has made significant progress in robotic manipulation tasks and it works well in the ideal disturbance-free environment. However, in a real-world environment, both internal and external disturbances are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Pingcheng Jian , Chao Yang , Di Guo , Huaping Liu , Fuchun Sun

We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Honghao Wei , Xiyue Peng , Arnob Ghosh , Xin Liu