English
Related papers

Related papers: Collaborative Yet Personalized Policy Training: Si…

200 papers

In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Weiya Ren

We provide a new non-asymptotic analysis of distributed TD(0) with linear function approximation. Our approach relies on "one-shot averaging," where $N$ agents run local copies of TD(0) and average the outcomes only once at the very end. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Rui Liu , Alex Olshevsky

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yaakov Engel , Michal Valko

Recent policy optimization approaches have achieved substantial empirical success by constructing surrogate optimization objectives. The Approximate Policy Iteration objective (Schulman et al., 2015a; Kakade and Langford, 2002) has become a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Marcin B. Tomczak , Sergio Valcarcel Macua , Enrique Munoz de Cote , Peter Vrancx

Off-Policy Actor-Critic (Off-PAC) methods have proven successful in a variety of continuous control tasks. Normally, the critic's action-value function is updated using temporal-difference, and the critic in turn provides a loss for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Wei Zhou , Yiying Li , Yongxin Yang , Huaimin Wang , Timothy M. Hospedales

Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Hélène Plisnier , Denis Steckelmacher , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

The current state-of-the-art theoretical analysis of Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms significantly lags in addressing the practical aspects of AC implementations. This crucial gap needs bridging to bring the analysis in line with practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Mudit Gaur , Amrit Singh Bedi , Di Wang , Vaneet Aggarwal

In this paper, we consider the problem of deploying a robot from a specification given as a temporal logic statement about some properties satisfied by the regions of a large, partitioned environment. We assume that the robot has noisy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2012-02-24 Xu Chu Ding , Jing Wang , Morteza Lahijanian , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Calin A. Belta

Critique-guided reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM agents by augmenting sparse outcome rewards with natural-language feedback. However, current methods often rely on static or offline critic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhicong Li , Lingjie Jiang , Yulan Hu , Xingchen Zeng , Yixia Li , Xiangwen Zhang , Guanhua Chen , Zheng Pan , Xin Li , Yong Liu

The actor-critic (AC) reinforcement learning algorithms have been the powerhouse behind many challenging applications. Nevertheless, its convergence is fragile in general. To study its instability, existing works mostly consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Xuyang Chen , Jingliang Duan , Yingbin Liang , Lin Zhao

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Actor-critic (AC) methods are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning. Although it is understood that AC methods are closely related to policy gradient (PG), their precise connection has not been fully characterized previously. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Junfeng Wen , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Dale Schuurmans

Spatial public goods games model collective dilemmas where individual payoffs depend on population-level strategy configurations. Most existing studies rely on evolutionary update rules or value-based reinforcement learning methods. These…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Zhaoqilin Yang , Axin Xiang , Kedi Yang , Tianjun Liu , Youliang Tian

This work develops a fully decentralized multi-agent algorithm for policy evaluation. The proposed scheme can be applied to two distinct scenarios. In the first scenario, a collection of agents have distinct datasets gathered following…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Lucas Cassano , Kun Yuan , Ali H. Sayed

Policy gradient reinforcement learning techniques enable an agent to directly learn an optimal action policy through the interactions with the environment. Nevertheless, despite its advantages, it sometimes suffers from slow convergence…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Mohammad G. Khoshkholgh , Halim Yanikomeroglu

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Policy gradient methods have become popular in multi-agent reinforcement learning, but they suffer from high variance due to the presence of environmental stochasticity and exploring agents (i.e., non-stationarity), which is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Yuchen Xiao , Xueguang Lyu , Christopher Amato

We study a decentralized variant of stochastic approximation, a data-driven approach for finding the root of an operator under noisy measurements. A network of agents, each with its own operator and data observations, cooperatively find the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

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

It is known that reinforcement learning (RL) is data-hungry. To improve sample-efficiency of RL, it has been proposed that the learning algorithm utilize data from 'approximately similar' processes. However, since the process models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vinay Kanakeri , Shivam Bajaj , Ashwin Verma , Vijay Gupta , Aritra Mitra