English
Related papers

Related papers: Efficient $Q$-Learning and Actor-Critic Methods fo…

200 papers

We present a novel $Q$-learning algorithm tailored to solve distributionally robust Markov decision problems where the corresponding ambiguity set of transition probabilities for the underlying Markov decision process is a Wasserstein ball…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Ariel Neufeld , Julian Sester

Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Tejaram Sangadi , L. A. Prashanth , Krishna Jagannathan

This work examines average-reward reinforcement learning with general policy parametrization. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) guarantees for this problem are either suboptimal or hindered by several challenges, including poor scalability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Average-reward reinforcement learning offers a principled framework for long-term decision-making by maximizing the mean reward per time step. Although Q-learning is a widely used model-free algorithm with established sample complexity in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Yuchen Jiao , Jiin Woo , Gen Li , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

Several recent works have focused on carrying out non-asymptotic convergence analyses for AC algorithms. Recently, a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm has been presented for the discounted cost setting in the look-up table case where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Ukjo Hwang , Songnam Hong

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

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

In this work, we study the problem of finding robust and safe policies in Robust Constrained Average-Cost Markov Decision Processes (RCMDPs). A key challenge in this setting is the lack of strong duality, which prevents the direct use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anirudh Satheesh , Sooraj Sathish , Swetha Ganesh , Keenan Powell , Vaneet Aggarwal

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

In many robotic applications, some aspects of the system dynamics can be modeled accurately while others are difficult to obtain or model. We present a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for continuous state and action spaces that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Tomoki Nishi , Prashant Doshi , Michael R. James , Danil Prokhorov

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

We propose a new simple and natural algorithm for learning the optimal Q-value function of a discounted-cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) when the transition kernels are unknown. Unlike the classical learning algorithms for MDPs, such as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-31 Dileep Kalathil , Vivek S. Borkar , Rahul Jain

We study a multi-agent reinforcement learning dynamics, and analyze its asymptotic behavior in infinite-horizon discounted Markov potential games. We focus on the independent and decentralized setting, where players do not know the game…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Chinmay Maheshwari , Manxi Wu , Druv Pai , Shankar Sastry

We consider model-free reinforcement learning for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a continuous state space and unknown transition kernel, when only a single sample path under an arbitrary policy of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie

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

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Tuomas Haarnoja , Aurick Zhou , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

This paper analyzes reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the average-reward criterion. We focus on Q-learning algorithms based on relative value iteration (RVI), which are model-free stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Yi Wan , Huizhen Yu , Richard S. Sutton
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›