English
Related papers

Related papers: ACSAC: Adaptive Chunk Size Actor-Critic with Causa…

200 papers

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

It is difficult to be able to imitate well in unknown states from a small amount of expert data and sampling data. Supervised learning methods such as Behavioral Cloning do not require sampling data, but usually suffer from distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-03 Daichi Nishio , Daiki Kuyoshi , Toi Tsuneda , Satoshi Yamane

In this paper, we devise a distributional framework on actor-critic as a solution to distributional instability, action type restriction, and conflation between samples and statistics. We propose a new method that minimizes the Cram\'er…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Daniel Wontae Nam , Younghoon Kim , Chan Y. Park

Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques have drawn great attention in many challenging tasks, but their performance deteriorates dramatically when applied to real-world problems. Various methods, such as domain randomization, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Wangyang Yue , Yuan Zhou , Xiaochuan Zhang , Yuchen Hua , Zhiyuan Wang , Guang Kou

Reinforcement Learning in large action spaces is a challenging problem. Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) exacerbates matters by imposing various constraints on communication and observability. In this work, we consider…

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…

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Ruofan Wu , Junmin Zhong , Jennie Si

Action chunking is a widely adopted approach in Learning from Demonstration (LfD). By modeling multi-step action chunks rather than single-step actions, action chunking significantly enhances modeling capabilities for human expert policies.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Yueyang Weng , Xiaopeng Zhang , Yongjin Mu , Yingcong Zhu , Yanjie Li , Qi Liu

We study the adaption of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which is considered as a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, from continuous action space to discrete action space. We revisit vanilla discrete SAC and provide an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Haibin Zhou , Tong Wei , Zichuan Lin , junyou li , Junliang Xing , Yuanchun Shi , Li Shen , Chao Yu , Deheng Ye

The exploration mechanism used by a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent plays a key role in determining its sample efficiency. Thus, improving over random exploration is crucial to solve long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Andrey Kurenkov , Ajay Mandlekar , Roberto Martin-Martin , Silvio Savarese , Animesh Garg

We present Q-chunking, a simple yet effective recipe for improving reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Our recipe is designed for the offline-to-online RL setting, where the goal is to leverage an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qiyang Li , Zhiyuan Zhou , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving complex decision-making and control tasks. However, many model-free RL algorithms experience performance degradation due to inaccurate value estimation, particularly the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Jingliang Duan , Wenxuan Wang , Liming Xiao , Jiaxin Gao , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Ya-Qin Zhang , Bo Cheng , Keqiang Li

We propose Adversarially Trained Actor Critic (ATAC), a new model-free algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) under insufficient data coverage, based on the concept of relative pessimism. ATAC is designed as a two-player…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Ching-An Cheng , Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

To improve efficiency and temporal coherence, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often predict action chunks; however, this action chunking harms reactivity under inference delay and long horizons. We introduce Asynchronous Action Chunk…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kohei Sendai , Maxime Alvarez , Tatsuya Matsushima , Yutaka Matsuo , Yusuke Iwasawa

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Harshat Kumar , Alec Koppel , Alejandro Ribeiro

Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning is challenging due to delayed and stochastic outcomes. Monte Carlo targets can bridge long delays between action and consequence but lead to high-variance targets due to stochasticity.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Aditya A. Ramesh , Kenny Young , Louis Kirsch , Jürgen Schmidhuber

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

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

Advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have demonstrated data efficiency and optimal control over large state spaces at the cost of scalable performance. Genetic methods, on the other hand, provide scalability but depict hyperparameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Karush Suri , Xiao Qi Shi , Konstantinos N. Plataniotis , Yuri A. Lawryshyn