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Reinforcement learning substantially improves pretrained language models, but it remains understudied why critic-free methods such as PPO and GRPO work as well as they do, and when they should provide the largest gains. We develop a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Arip Asadulaev , Daniil Ognev , Karim Salta , Martin Takac

In this work we derive a second-order approach to bilevel optimization, a type of mathematical programming in which the solution to a parameterized optimization problem (the "lower" problem) is itself to be optimized (in the "upper"…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-06 Robert Dyro , Edward Schmerling , Nikos Arechiga , Marco Pavone

Deterministic policy gradient algorithms for continuous control suffer from value estimation biases that degrade performance. While double critics reduce such biases, the exploration potential of double actors remains underexplored.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Haohui Chen , Zhiyong Chen , Aoxiang Liu , Wentuo Fang

The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Jiacai Liu , Chaojie Wang , Chris Yuhao Liu , Liang Zeng , Rui Yan , Yiwen Sun , Yang Liu , Yahui Zhou

Reinforcement learning in multi-agent scenarios is important for real-world applications but presents challenges beyond those seen in single-agent settings. We present an actor-critic algorithm that trains decentralized policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Ehsan Imani , Eric Graves , Martha White

This study proposes the use of a social learning method to estimate a global state within a multi-agent off-policy actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) operating in a partially observable environment. We assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Ainur Zhaikhan , Ali H. Sayed

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Thomas Spooner , Rahul Savani

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jake Grigsby , Jin Yong Yoo , Yanjun Qi

This study addresses the challenges of dynamics and complexity in intelligent human-computer interaction and proposes a reinforcement learning-based optimization framework to improve long-term returns and overall experience. Human-computer…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Rui Liu , Yifan Zhuang , Runsheng Zhang

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

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

Neural Network based approximations of the Value function make up the core of leading Policy Based methods such as Trust Regional Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). While this adds significant value when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Hari Srikanth

Behavior constrained policy optimization has been demonstrated to be a successful paradigm for tackling Offline Reinforcement Learning. By exploiting historical transitions, a policy is trained to maximize a learned value function while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Jiachen Li , Edwin Zhang , Ming Yin , Qinxun Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang , William Yang Wang

In the context of Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), applying Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) faces challenges related to the update order of its actor and critic due to the aggregation step occurring between successive iterations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zhijie Xie , Shenghui Song

In this paper, we discuss the deterministic policy gradient using the Actor-Critic methods based on the linear compatible advantage function approximator, where the input spaces are continuous. When the policy is restricted by hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-07 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Hossein Nejatbakhsh Esfahani , Sebastien Gros

We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Navdeep Kumar , Priyank Agrawal , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar