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We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Deterministic policy gradient algorithms are foundational for actor-critic methods in controlling continuous systems, yet they often encounter inaccuracies due to their dependence on the derivative of the critic's value estimates with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Baturay Saglam , Dionysis Kalogerias

High-precision control tasks present substantial challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, frequently resulting in suboptimal performance attributed to network approximation inaccuracies and inadequate sample quality.These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Donghe Chen , Yubin Peng , Tengjie Zheng , Han Wang , Chaoran Qu , Lin Cheng

In this paper, we establish the global optimality and convergence rate of an off-policy actor critic algorithm in the tabular setting without using density ratio to correct the discrepancy between the state distribution of the behavior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Shangtong Zhang , Remi Tachet , Romain Laroche

Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Zhiyao Zhang , Myeung Suk Oh , FNU Hairi , Ziyue Luo , Alvaro Velasquez , Jia Liu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has attracted much research attention recently. However, unlike its single-agent counterpart, many theoretical and algorithmic aspects of MARL have not been well-understood. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Siliang Zeng , Tianyi Chen , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

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

The two-time scale nature of SAC, which is an actor-critic algorithm, is characterised by the fact that the critic estimate has not converged for the actor at any given time, but since the critic learns faster than the actor, it ensures…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Tengyu Xu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Yingbin Liang

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms show remarkable performance in complex simulated environments. A key element of SAC networks is entropy regularization, which prevents the SAC actor from optimizing against fine grained features,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Miguel Campo , Zhengxing Chen , Luke Kung , Kittipat Virochsiri , Jianyu Wang

Optimal control problems with free terminal time present many challenges including nonsmooth and discontinuous control laws, irregular value functions, many local optima, and the curse of dimensionality. To overcome these issues, we propose…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-08 Evan Burton , Tenavi Nakamura-Zimmerer , Qi Gong , Wei Kang

Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Max Qiushi Lin , Reza Asad , Kevin Tan , Haque Ishfaq , Csaba Szepesvari , Sharan Vaswani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Reza Asad , Reza Babanezhad , Sharan Vaswani

This work presents a comprehensive analysis to regularize the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm with automatic temperature adjustment. The the policy evaluation, the policy improvement and the temperature adjustment are reformulated,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Ben You

\Ac{MPC} and \ac{RL} are two powerful control strategies with, arguably, complementary advantages. In this work, we show how actor-critic \ac{RL} techniques can be leveraged to improve the performance of \ac{MPC}. The \ac{RL} critic is used…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-07 Rudolf Reiter , Andrea Ghezzi , Katrin Baumgärtner , Jasper Hoffmann , Robert D. McAllister , Moritz Diehl

In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-28 Weijian Li , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Deep Actor-Critic algorithms, which combine Actor-Critic with deep neural network (DNN), have been among the most prevalent reinforcement learning algorithms for decision-making problems in simulated environments. However, the existing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Kexuan Wang , An Liu , Baishuo Lin

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We consider linear two-time-scale stochastic approximation algorithms driven by martingale noise. Recent applications in machine learning motivate the need to understand finite-time error rates, but conventional stochastic approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Seo Taek Kong , Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , R. Srikant