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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

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

We introduce a class of variational actor-critic algorithms based on a variational formulation over both the value function and the policy. The objective function of the variational formulation consists of two parts: one for maximizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuhua Zhu , Lexing Ying

Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Yisong Yue , Animashree Anandkumar

Reinforcement learning has attracted great attention recently, especially policy gradient algorithms, which have been demonstrated on challenging decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we propose an active multi-step TD algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Gang Chen , Dingcheng Li , Ran Xu

Natural policy gradient methods are popular reinforcement learning methods that improve the stability of policy gradient methods by utilizing second-order approximations to precondition the gradient with the inverse of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Brennan Gebotys , Alexander Wong , David A. Clausi

This paper presents the Relaxed Continuous-Time Actor-critic (RCTAC) algorithm, a method for finding the nearly optimal policy for nonlinear continuous-time (CT) systems with known dynamics and infinite horizon, such as the path-tracking…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-31 Jingliang Duan , Jie Li , Qiang Ge , Shengbo Eben Li , Monimoy Bujarbaruah , Fei Ma , Dezhao Zhang

We introduce Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO), an actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. WPO can be derived as an approximation to Wasserstein gradient flow over the space of all policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 David Pfau , Ian Davies , Diana Borsa , Joao G. M. Araujo , Brendan Tracey , Hado van Hasselt

Accelerating the convergence of second-order optimization, particularly Newton-type methods, remains a pivotal challenge in algorithmic research. In this paper, we extend previous work on the \textbf{Quadratic Gradient (QG)} and rigorously…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 John Chiang

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL)-based backstepping control strategy to achieve fixed time consensus in nonlinear multi-agent systems with strict feedback dynamics. Agents exchange only output information with their…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-23 Aria Delshad , Maryam Babazadeh

To improve policy robustness of deep reinforcement learning agents, a line of recent works focus on producing disturbances of the environment. Existing approaches of the literature to generate meaningful disturbances of the environment are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Lucas Schott , Hatem Hajri , Sylvain Lamprier

By using an parametric value function to replace the Monte-Carlo rollouts for value estimation, the actor-critic (AC) algorithms can reduce the variance of stochastic policy gradient so that to improve the convergence rate. While existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Yanjie Dong , Haijun Zhang , Gang Wang , Shisheng Cui , Xiping Hu

We present a policy iteration algorithm for the infinite-horizon N-player general-sum deterministic linear quadratic dynamic games and compare it to policy gradient methods. We demonstrate that the proposed policy iteration algorithm is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-07 Yuxiang Guan , Giulio Salizzoni , Maryam Kamgarpour , Tyler H. Summers

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Continuous control of non-stationary environments is a major challenge for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The time-dependency of the state transition dynamics aggravates the notorious stability problems of model-free deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Abdullah Akgül , Gulcin Baykal , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. The main players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients of neural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Recep Yusuf Bekci , Mehmet Gümüş

We explore deep reinforcement learning methods for multi-agent domains. We begin by analyzing the difficulty of traditional algorithms in the multi-agent case: Q-learning is challenged by an inherent non-stationarity of the environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Ryan Lowe , Yi Wu , Aviv Tamar , Jean Harb , Pieter Abbeel , Igor Mordatch

We present a training framework for neural abstractive summarization based on actor-critic approaches from reinforcement learning. In the traditional neural network based methods, the objective is only to maximize the likelihood of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-16 Piji Li , Lidong Bing , Wai Lam

The linear regression (LR) method offers the advantage that optimal parameters can be calculated relatively easily, although its representation capability is limited than that of the deep learning technique. To improve deep reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Hisato Komatsu