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Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

As neural networks continue to grow in size but datasets might not, it is vital to understand how much performance improvement can be expected: is it more important to scale network size or data volume? Thus, neural network scaling laws,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Akhilan Boopathy , Ila Fiete

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a number of challenging problems. Despite these empirical successes, theoretical understanding of different algorithms is lacking, primarily due to the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Yuwei Luo , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mladen Kolar

In this paper, we establish universal approximation theorems for neural networks applied to general nonlinear ill-posed operator equations. In addition to the approximation error, the measurement error is also taken into account in our…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Lan Wang , Qiao Zhu , Bangti Jin , Ye Zhang

Neural scaling laws describe how the performance of deep neural networks scales with key factors such as training data size, model complexity, and training time, often following power-law behaviors over multiple orders of magnitude. Despite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-14 Roman Worschech , Bernd Rosenow

Many reinforcement learning methods achieve great success in practice but lack theoretical foundation. In this paper, we study the convergence analysis on the problem of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The global linear convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Zeyu Jin , Johann Michael Schmitt , Zaiwen Wen

In this paper we address the problem of uncertainty management for robust design, and verification of large dynamic networks whose performance is affected by an equally large number of uncertain parameters. Many such networks (e.g. power,…

Computation · Statistics 2011-10-12 Amit Surana , Tuhin Sahai , Andrzej Banaszuk

Inspired by measurement incompatibility and Bell-family inequalities in quantum mechanics, we propose the Non-Classical Network (NCnet), a simple classical neural architecture that stably exhibits non-classical statistical behaviors under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Hanyu Zhao , Yang Wu , Yuexian Hou

We introduce a reinforcement learning method for a class of non-Markov systems; our approach extends the actor-critic framework given by Rose et al. [New J. Phys. 23 013013 (2021)] for obtaining scaled cumulant generating functions…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-03-09 Venkata D. Pamulaparthy , Rosemary J. Harris

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

Sample efficiency is a central property of effective deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Recent work has improved this through added complexity, such as larger models, exotic network architectures, and more complex algorithms, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Daniel Palenicek , Florian Vogt , Joe Watson , Ingmar Posner , Jan Peters

This paper explores the estimation of a panel data model with cross-sectional interaction that is flexible both in its approach to specifying the network of connections between cross-sectional units, and in controlling for unobserved…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-11-23 Ayden Higgins , Federico Martellosio

We propose a novel actor-critic algorithm with guaranteed convergence to an optimal policy for a discounted reward Markov decision process. The actor incorporates a descent direction that is motivated by the solution of a certain non-linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-30 Prashanth L. A. , H. L. Prasad , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Prakash Chandra

We present distributed algorithms that can be used by multiple agents to align their estimates with a particular value over a network with time-varying connectivity. Our framework is general in that this value can represent a consensus…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-04-20 Angelia Nedić , Asuman Ozdaglar , Pablo A. Parrilo

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

This work examines average-reward reinforcement learning with general policy parametrization. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) guarantees for this problem are either suboptimal or hindered by several challenges, including poor scalability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

In many areas of engineering and sciences, decision rules and control strategies are usually designed based on nominal values of relevant system parameters. To ensure that a control strategy or decision rule will work properly when the…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-06-16 Xinjia Chen