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Related papers: Second-Order Actor-Critic Methods for Discounted M…

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Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo , Matteo Papini

The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

The actor-critic RL is widely used in various robotic control tasks. By viewing the actor-critic RL from the perspective of variational inference (VI), the policy network is trained to obtain the approximate posterior of actions given the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Duo Xu , Faramarz Fekri

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

Natural policy gradient methods are popular reinforcement learning methods that improve the stability of policy gradient methods by utilizing second-order approximations to precondition the gradient with the inverse of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Brennan Gebotys , Alexander Wong , David A. Clausi

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Arushi Jain , Gandharv Patil , Ayush Jain , Khimya Khetarpal , Doina Precup

In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Prashanth L. A. , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

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

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Tuomas Haarnoja , Aurick Zhou , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-14 Yemi Okesanjo , Victor Kofia

This paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that leverages Frank-Wolfe policy optimization to address frame-level bit allocation for HEVC/H.265. Most previous RL-based approaches adopt the single-critic design, which weights…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-11 Yung-Han Ho , Yun Liang , Chia-Hao Kao , Wen-Hsiao Peng

This paper introduces a dual-critic reinforcement learning (RL) framework to address the problem of frame-level bit allocation in HEVC/H.265. The objective is to minimize the distortion of a group of pictures (GOP) under a rate constraint.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Yung-Han Ho , Guo-Lun Jin , Yun Liang , Wen-Hsiao Peng , Xiaobo Li

We investigate the discounting mismatch in actor-critic algorithm implementations from a representation learning perspective. Theoretically, actor-critic algorithms usually have discounting for both actor and critic, i.e., there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Shangtong Zhang , Romain Laroche , Harm van Seijen , Shimon Whiteson , Remi Tachet des Combes

In the field of reinforcement learning, because of the high cost and risk of policy training in the real world, policies are trained in a simulation environment and transferred to the corresponding real-world environment. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Takumi Tanabe , Rei Sato , Kazuto Fukuchi , Jun Sakuma , Youhei Akimoto

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Ishan Durugkar , Matthew Hausknecht , Adith Swaminathan , Patrick MacAlpine

In this paper, we study a second-order approach to policy optimization in reinforcement learning. Existing second-order methods often suffer from suboptimal sample complexity or rely on unrealistic assumptions about importance sampling. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Cheng Sun , Zhen Zhang , Shaofu Yang

There is a growing interest in integrating machine learning techniques and optimization to solve challenging optimization problems. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning methodology for the job shop scheduling problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-22 Marta Monaci , Valerio Agasucci , Giorgio Grani

Model predictive control (MPC) is widely used in process control due to its interpretability and ability to handle constraints. As a parametric policy in reinforcement learning (RL), MPC offers strong initial performance and low data…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-03 Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia