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Evolving next-generation mobile networks is designed to provide ubiquitous coverage and networked sensing. With utility of multi-view sensing and multi-node joint transmission, cell-free is a promising technique to realize this prospect.…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Fanfei Xu , Shengheng Liu , Zihuan Mao , Shangqing Shi , Dazhuan Xu , Dongming Wang , Yongming Huang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin

This paper introduces the Active-Importance-Sampling Actor-Critic (AISAC) algorithm, an extension of the Actor-Critic framework for reducing variance in policy gradient estimation. AISAC optimizes the behavior policy to minimize gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Majid Molaei , Gabor Paczolay , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Learning expressive stochastic policies instead of deterministic ones has been proposed to achieve better stability, sample complexity, and robustness. Notably, in Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL), the policy is modeled as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Safa Messaoud , Billel Mokeddem , Zhenghai Xue , Linsey Pang , Bo An , Haipeng Chen , Sanjay Chawla

The trend is to implement intelligent agents capable of analyzing available information and utilize it efficiently. This work presents a number of reinforcement learning (RL) architectures; one of them is designed for intelligent agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Ala'eddin Masadeh , Zhengdao Wang , Ahmed E. Kamal

The actor-critic (AC) algorithm is a popular method to find an optimal policy in reinforcement learning. In the infinite horizon scenario, the finite-sample convergence rate for the AC and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Simon Ramstedt , Yann Bouteiller , Giovanni Beltrame , Christopher Pal , Jonathan Binas

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang

When creating new reinforcement learning tasks, practitioners often accelerate the learning process by incorporating into the task several accessory components, such as breaking the environment interaction into independent episodes and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Homayoon Farrahi , A. Rupam Mahmood

In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Safwan Labbi , Paul Mangold , Daniil Tiapkin , Eric Moulines

A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Eric Graves , Ehsan Imani , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

Generalizability and stability are two key objectives for operating reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. Designing RL algorithms that optimize these objectives can be a costly and painstaking process. This paper presents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Juan Jose Garau-Luis , Yingjie Miao , John D. Co-Reyes , Aaron Parisi , Jie Tan , Esteban Real , Aleksandra Faust

We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for deep reinforcement learning that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization of deep neural network controllers. We present asynchronous variants of four standard…

We introduce D2AC, a new model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to train expressive diffusion policies online effectively. At its core is a policy improvement objective that avoids the high variance of typical policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lunjun Zhang , Shuo Han , Hanrui Lyu , Bradly C Stadie

Multi-step learning applies lookahead over multiple time steps and has proved valuable in policy evaluation settings. However, in the optimal control case, the impact of multi-step learning has been relatively limited despite a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Yunhao Tang , Tadashi Kozuno , Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Rémi Munos , Bernardo Ávila Pires , Michal Valko

How to obtain good value estimation is one of the key problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current value estimation methods, such as DDPG and TD3, suffer from unnecessary over- or underestimation bias. In this paper, we explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jiafei Lyu , Xiaoteng Ma , Jiangpeng Yan , Xiu Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable performance in numerous sequential decision making and control tasks. However, a common problem is that learned nearly optimal policy always overfits to the training environment and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Yangang Ren , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yang Guan , Qi Sun

Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

The deployment of robots in uncontrolled environments requires them to operate robustly under previously unseen scenarios, like irregular terrain and wind conditions. Unfortunately, while rigorous safety frameworks from robust optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Kai-Chieh Hsu , Duy Phuong Nguyen , Jaime Fernández Fisac