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Related papers: Actor-Critic with Active Importance Sampling

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Actor-critic methods constitute a central paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), coupling policy evaluation with policy improvement. While effective across many domains, these methods rely on separate actor and critic networks, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

We establish an optimal sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ for obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal global policy using a single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Navdeep Kumar , Tehila Dahan , Lior Cohen , Ananyabrata Barua , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms, which aim to learn a model of the environment to make decisions, are more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts. The sample efficiency of model-based approaches relies on whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Zhihai Wang , Jie Wang , Qi Zhou , Bin Li , Houqiang Li

As an important type of reinforcement learning algorithms, actor-critic (AC) and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms are often executed in two ways for finding optimal policies. In the first nested-loop design, actor's one update of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

To learn approximately optimal acting policies for decision problems, modern Actor Critic algorithms rely on deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to parameterize the acting policy and greedification operators to iteratively improve it. The reliance…

Standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms use a shared representation for the policy and value function, especially when training directly from images. However, we argue that more information is needed to accurately estimate the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Roberta Raileanu , Rob Fergus

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: high sample…

Simultaneously optimizing multiple, frequently conflicting, molecular properties is a key bottleneck in the development of novel therapeutics. Although a promising approach, the efficacy of multi-task learning is often compromised by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Mason Minot , Gisbert Schneider

Despite the promising results achieved, state-of-the-art interactive reinforcement learning schemes rely on passively receiving supervision signals from advisor experts, in the form of either continuous monitoring or pre-defined rules,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shunyu Liu , Kaixuan Chen , Na Yu , Jie Song , Zunlei Feng , Mingli Song

Reinforcement learning has been proven to be highly effective in handling complex control tasks. Traditional methods typically use unimodal distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, to model the output of value distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Tong Liu , Yinuo Wang , Xujie Song , Wenjun Zou , Liangfa Chen , Likun Wang , Bin Shuai , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

As large language models become components of larger agentic systems, evaluation reliability becomes critical: unreliable sub-agents introduce brittleness into downstream system behavior. Yet current evaluation practice, reporting a single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Zairah Mustahsan , Abel Lim , Megna Anand , Saahil Jain , Bryan McCann

The oscillating performance of off-policy learning and persisting errors in the actor-critic (AC) setting call for algorithms that can conservatively learn to suit the stability-critical applications better. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Lingwei Zhu , Toshinori Kitamura , Takamitsu Matsubara

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (MFRL), leveraging the policy gradient theorem, has demonstrated considerable success in continuous control tasks. However, these approaches are plagued by high gradient variance due to zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Ignat Georgiev , Krishnan Srinivasan , Jie Xu , Eric Heiden , Animesh Garg

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose

Adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms are used to adapt the video bitrate based on the network conditions to improve the overall video quality of experience (QoE). Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) and asynchronous advantage actor-critic…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Mandan Naresh , Paresh Saxena , Manik Gupta

Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Tanuja Joshi , Hariprasad Kodamana , Harikumar Kandath , Niket Kaisare

Policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in challenging learning tasks such as continuous control, but suffer from high sample complexity. Experience replay is a commonly used approach to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-19 Saad Mohamad , Giovanni Montana

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

As an emerging paradigm of content creation, AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has been widely adopted by a large number of edge end users. However, the requests for generated content from AIGC users have obvious diversity, and there remains a…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Yaju Liu , Xi Lin , Siyuan Li , Gaolei Li , Qinghua Mao , Jianhua Li