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This paper proposes a step toward approximate Bayesian inference in on-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning. It is implemented through three changes to the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm: (1) applying a ReLU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Andrew Jesson , Chris Lu , Gunshi Gupta , Nicolas Beltran-Velez , Angelos Filos , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Yarin Gal

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

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven a powerful technique in many sequential decision making domains. However, Robotics poses many challenges for RL, most notably training on a physical system can be expensive and dangerous, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-10-19 Lerrel Pinto , Marcin Andrychowicz , Peter Welinder , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Criticality has been proposed as a key principle underlying complex behavior in biological and artificial systems; however, how criticality translates from individual dynamics to collective behavior remains unclear. We study this question…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2026-05-05 Nicolas Bessone , Erwan Plantec

The varying significance of distinct primitive behaviors during the policy learning process has been overlooked by prior model-free RL algorithms. Leveraging this insight, we explore the causal relationship between different action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tianying Ji , Yongyuan Liang , Yan Zeng , Yu Luo , Guowei Xu , Jiawei Guo , Ruijie Zheng , Furong Huang , Fuchun Sun , Huazhe Xu

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

In Reinforcement Learning, the optimal action at a given state is dependent on policy decisions at subsequent states. As a consequence, the learning targets evolve with time and the policy optimization process must be efficient at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Romain Laroche , Remi Tachet

We prove that a single-layer neural network trained with the online actor critic algorithm converges in distribution to a random ordinary differential equation (ODE) as the number of hidden units and the number of training steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Samuel Chun-Hei Lam , Justin Sirignano , Ziheng Wang

Analyzing and controlling system entropy is a powerful tool for regulating predictability of control systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from reinforcement learning and data security to human-robot collaboration. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-06 Menno van Zutphen , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Duarte J. Antunes

Accounting for the fact that users have different sequential patterns, the main drawback of state-of-the-art recommendation strategies is that a fixed sequence length of user-item interactions is required as input to train the models. This…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Stefanos Antaris , Dimitrios Rafailidis

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

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

The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qinxun Bai , Yuxuan Han , Wei Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

In this paper, we establish the global optimality and convergence rate of an off-policy actor critic algorithm in the tabular setting without using density ratio to correct the discrepancy between the state distribution of the behavior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Shangtong Zhang , Remi Tachet , Romain Laroche

Actor-critic methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various challenging tasks. However, theoretical understandings of their performance remain elusive and challenging. Existing studies mostly focus on practically uncommon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Xuyang Chen , Jingliang Duan , Lin Zhao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and its integration with deep learning have achieved impressive performance in various robotic control tasks, ranging from motion planning and navigation to end-to-end visual manipulation. However, stability is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Minghao Han , Lixian Zhang , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

How to obtain good value estimation is one of the key problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current value estimation methods, such as DDPG and TD3, suffer from unnecessary over- or underestimation bias. In this paper, we explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jiafei Lyu , Xiaoteng Ma , Jiangpeng Yan , Xiu Li

We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient…

This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Niao He , Lihong Li , Le Song

In this effort, we consider the impact of regularization on the diversity of actions taken by policies generated from reinforcement learning agents trained using a policy gradient. Policy gradient agents are prone to entropy collapse, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Andrew Starnes , Anton Dereventsov , Clayton Webster