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The main challenge of multiagent reinforcement learning is the difficulty of learning useful policies in the presence of other simultaneously learning agents whose changing behaviors jointly affect the environment's transition and reward…

Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Prateek Jain , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Maryam Fazel , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Mehran Mesbahi

We study model-free policy learning for discrete-time mean-field control (MFC) problems with finite state space and compact action space. In contrast to the extensive literature on value-based methods for MFC, policy-based approaches remain…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Matthieu Meunier , Huyên Pham , Christoph Reisinger

Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

Real-world control systems require policies that are not only high-performing but also interpretable and robust. A promising direction toward this goal is model-based control, which learns system dynamics and cost functions from historical…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-20 Yuexin Bian , Jie Feng , Yuanyuan Shi

This paper introduces a model-based approach for training feedback controllers for an autonomous agent operating in a highly nonlinear (albeit deterministic) environment. We desire the trained policy to ensure that the agent satisfies…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-29 Navid Hashemi , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Georgios Fainekos , Jyotirmoy Deshmukh

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Decision making under uncertainty is critical to real-world, autonomous systems. Model Predictive Control (MPC) methods have demonstrated favorable performance in practice, but remain limited when dealing with complex probability…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Alexander Lambert , Adam Fishman , Dieter Fox , Byron Boots , Fabio Ramos

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

Many Imitation and Reinforcement Learning approaches rely on the availability of expert-generated demonstrations for learning policies or value functions from data. Obtaining a reliable distribution of trajectories from motion planners is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Alexander Lambert , Byron Boots

This paper presents an approach for data-driven policy refinement in reinforcement learning, specifically designed for safety-critical applications. Our methodology leverages the strengths of data-driven optimization and reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Ali Baheri

For over a decade, model-based reinforcement learning has been seen as a way to leverage control-based domain knowledge to improve the sample-efficiency of reinforcement learning agents. While model-based agents are conceptually appealing,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-28 Brandon Amos , Samuel Stanton , Denis Yarats , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Offline reinforcement learning provides a viable approach to obtain advanced control strategies for dynamical systems, in particular when direct interaction with the environment is not available. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Marc Weber , Phillip Swazinna , Daniel Hein , Steffen Udluft , Volkmar Sterzing

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman , Mohsen Zamani

While often stated as an instance of the likelihood ratio trick [Rubinstein, 1989], the original policy gradient theorem [Sutton, 1999] involves an integral over the action space. When this integral can be computed, the resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Benjamin Petit , Loren Amdahl-Culleton , Yao Liu , Jimmy Smith , Pierre-Luc Bacon

Mathematical and computational tools have proven to be reliable in decision-making processes. In recent times, in particular, machine learning-based methods are becoming increasingly popular as advanced support tools. When dealing with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-23 Christina Schenk , Aditya Vasudevan , Maciej Haranczyk , Ignacio Romero