Related papers: Quasi-Newton Compatible Actor-Critic for Determini…
We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
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…
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…
This paper presents a model-free approximation for the Hessian of the performance of deterministic policies to use in the context of Reinforcement Learning based on Quasi-Newton steps in the policy parameters. We show that the approximate…
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…
We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…
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…
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…
We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…
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…
We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…
Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…
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…
This paper presents the first actor-critic algorithm for off-policy reinforcement learning. Our algorithm is online and incremental, and its per-time-step complexity scales linearly with the number of learned weights. Previous work on…
Quantum computing offers efficient encapsulation of high-dimensional states. In this work, we propose a novel quantum reinforcement learning approach that combines the Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm with variational quantum circuits by…
We present the first provably convergent two-timescale off-policy actor-critic algorithm (COF-PAC) with function approximation. Key to COF-PAC is the introduction of a new critic, the emphasis critic, which is trained via Gradient Emphasis…
Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…