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Related papers: Actor-Critic for Continuous Action Chunks: A Reinf…

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Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Rui Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and its integration with deep learning have achieved impressive performance in various robotic control tasks, ranging from motion planning and navigation to end-to-end visual manipulation. However, stability is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Minghao Han , Lixian Zhang , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

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

As an important algorithm in deep reinforcement learning, advantage actor critic (A2C) has been widely succeeded in both discrete and continuous control tasks with raw pixel inputs, but its sample efficiency still needs to improve more. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Yuan Wang , Chunyuan Zhang , Tianzong Yu , Meng Ma

In the domain of continuous control, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) demonstrates promising results. However, the dependence of DRL on deep neural networks (DNNs) results in the demand for extensive data and increased computational cost.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Shiron Thalagala , Pak Kin Wong , Xiaozheng Wang , Tianang Sun

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Ozsel Kilinc , Giovanni Montana

We present Q-chunking, a simple yet effective recipe for improving reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Our recipe is designed for the offline-to-online RL setting, where the goal is to leverage an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qiyang Li , Zhiyuan Zhou , Sergey Levine

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been popular in many disciplines including robotics, state-of-the-art DRL algorithms still struggle to learn long-horizon, multi-step and sparse reward tasks, such as stacking several blocks…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Xintong Yang , Ze Ji , Jing Wu , Yu-kun Lai

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia , Jiaqi Yan

Deep reinforcement learning has obtained significant breakthroughs in recent years. Most methods in deep-RL achieve good results via the maximization of the reward signal provided by the environment, typically in the form of discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Yubin Deng , Ke Yu , Dahua Lin , Xiaoou Tang , Chen Change Loy

In this paper, we present a new intrinsically motivated actor-critic algorithm for learning continuous motor skills directly from raw visual input. Our neural architecture is composed of a critic and an actor network. Both networks receive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Muhammad Burhan Hafez , Cornelius Weber , Matthias Kerzel , Stefan Wermter

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Andrey Kurenkov , Ajay Mandlekar , Roberto Martin-Martin , Silvio Savarese , Animesh Garg

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an appealing formalism for learning control policies from experience. However, the classic active formulation of RL necessitates a lengthy active exploration process for each behavior, making it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ashvin Nair , Abhishek Gupta , Murtaza Dalal , Sergey Levine

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

Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhiwei Shang , Xinyi Yuan , Wenjun Huang , Yunduan Cui , Di Chen , Meixin Zhu

Recent advances in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) have created unprecedented opportunities for intelligent automation, where a machine can autonomously learn an optimal policy for performing a given task. However, current deep RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Zohreh Raziei , Mohsen Moghaddam

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Actor-critic methods constitute a central paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), coupling policy evaluation with policy improvement. While effective across many domains, these methods rely on separate actor and critic networks, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced the control of physics-based and robotic characters that track kinematic reference motion. However, methods typically rely on a weighted sum of conflicting reward functions, requiring…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Lucas N. Alegre , Agon Serifi , Ruben Grandia , David Müller , Espen Knoop , Moritz Bächer