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Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Tejaram Sangadi , L. A. Prashanth , Krishna Jagannathan

This work considers the problem of learning cooperative policies in multi-agent settings with partially observable and non-stationary environments without a communication channel. We focus on improving information sharing between agents and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Eshagh Kargar , Ville Kyrki

Recent success in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) relies on centralized training and policy sharing. Centralized training eliminates the issue of non-stationarity MARL yet induces large communication costs, and policy…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-04-04 Dingyang Chen , Yile Li , Qi Zhang

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has attracted much research attention recently. However, unlike its single-agent counterpart, many theoretical and algorithmic aspects of MARL have not been well-understood. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Siliang Zeng , Tianyi Chen , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Reinforcement learning (RL) actor-critic algorithms enable autonomous learning but often require a large number of environment interactions, which limits their applicability in robotics. Leveraging expert data can reduce the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Andreas Kernbach , Amr Elsheikh , Nicolas Grupp , René Nagel , Marco F. Huber

Actor-critic (AC) is a powerful method for learning an optimal policy in reinforcement learning, where the critic uses algorithms, e.g., temporal difference (TD) learning with function approximation, to evaluate the current policy and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yudan Wang , Yue Wang , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Federated learning (FL) can dramatically speed up reinforcement learning by distributing exploration and training across multiple agents. It can guarantee an optimal convergence rate that scales linearly in the number of agents, i.e., a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Ankur Naskar , Gugan Thoppe , Utsav Negi , Vijay Gupta

We consider the estimation of the policy gradient in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) with a special class of structured policies that are finite-state controllers. We show that the gradient estimation can be done in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Huizhen Yu

Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Anas Barakat , Pascal Bianchi , Julien Lehmann

In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst , Aditya Mahajan

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Mo Zhou , Jianfeng Lu

Federated learning (FL) has recently gained much attention due to its effectiveness in speeding up supervised learning tasks under communication and privacy constraints. However, whether similar speedups can be established for reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Nicolò Dal Fabbro , Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

In this paper, we establish last-iterate convergence rates for off-policy actor--critic methods in reinforcement learning. In particular, under a single-loop, single-timescale implementation and a broad class of policy updates, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ishaq Hamza , Zaiwei Chen

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Markus Holzleitner , Lukas Gruber , José Arjona-Medina , Johannes Brandstetter , Sepp Hochreiter

Federated reinforcement learning (FedRL) enables multiple agents to collaboratively learn a policy without sharing their local trajectories collected during agent-environment interactions. However, in practice, the environments faced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Guojun Xiong , Shufan Wang , Daniel Jiang , Jian Li

Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Sajad Khodadadian , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg , Siva Theja Maguluri

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani