Related papers: Wasserstein Barycenter Soft Actor-Critic
Soft actor-critic (SAC) in reinforcement learning is expected to be one of the next-generation robot control schemes. Its ability to maximize policy entropy would make a robotic controller robust to noise and perturbation, which is useful…
While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of…
Training a game-playing reinforcement learning agent requires multiple interactions with the environment. Ignorant random exploration may cause a waste of time and resources. It's essential to alleviate such waste. As discussed in this…
Hidden confounders that influence both states and actions can bias policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL), leading to suboptimal or non-generalizable behavior. Most RL algorithms ignore this issue, learning policies from…
Designing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms is typically a very challenging task, because a desirable iteration update often involves an expectation over an on-policy distribution. Prior off-policy actor-critic (AC) algorithms…
Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…
Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…
We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…
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…
Adopting reasonable strategies is challenging but crucial for an intelligent agent with limited resources working in hazardous, unstructured, and dynamic environments to improve the system's utility, decrease the overall cost, and increase…
Optimizing dynamic risk with stochastic policies is challenging in both policy updates and value learning. The former typically requires transition perturbation, while the latter may rely on model-based approaches. To address these…
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…
The exploration mechanism used by a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent plays a key role in determining its sample efficiency. Thus, improving over random exploration is crucial to solve long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards. We propose…
Reinforcement learning has gathered much attention in recent years due to its rapid development and rich applications, especially on control systems and robotics. When tackling real-world applications with reinforcement learning method, the…
Continuous control tasks in reinforcement learning are important because they provide an important framework for learning in high-dimensional state spaces with deceptive rewards, where the agent can easily become trapped into suboptimal…
Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…
We propose a new objective, the counterfactual objective, unifying existing objectives for off-policy policy gradient algorithms in the continuing reinforcement learning (RL) setting. Compared to the commonly used excursion objective, which…
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…
Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…
Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…