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Related papers: Learning continuous Q-Functions using generalized …

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We seek to learn an effective policy for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with continuous states via Q-Learning. Given a set of basis functions over state action pairs we search for a corresponding set of linear weights that minimizes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-09-27 Charles Tripp , Ross D. Shachter

We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Weiqin Chen , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu , Santiago Paternain

In classical Q-learning, the objective is to maximize the sum of discounted rewards through iteratively using the Bellman equation as an update, in an attempt to estimate the action value function of the optimal policy. Conventionally, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Hadi S. Jomaa , Josif Grabocka , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

We study the problem of computing the value function from a discretely-observed trajectory of a continuous-time diffusion process. We develop a new class of algorithms based on easily implementable numerical schemes that are compatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Wenlong Mou , Yuhua Zhu

It has long been assumed that high dimensional continuous control problems cannot be solved effectively by discretizing individual dimensions of the action space due to the exponentially large number of bins over which policies would have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Luke Metz , Julian Ibarz , Navdeep Jaitly , James Davidson

Q-learning suffers from overestimation bias, because it approximates the maximum action value using the maximum estimated action value. Algorithms have been proposed to reduce overestimation bias, but we lack an understanding of how bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-10 Qingfeng Lan , Yangchen Pan , Alona Fyshe , Martha White

We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Philip Amortila , Doina Precup , Prakash Panangaden , Marc G. Bellemare

Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-29 Koulik Khamaru , Eric Xia , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Q-learning is a promising method for solving optimal control problems for uncertain systems without the explicit need for system identification. However, approaches for continuous-time Q-learning have limited provable safety guarantees,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-01-30 Soutrik Bandyopadhyay , Shubhendu Bhasin

We propose a novel distributionally robust $Q$-learning algorithm for the non-tabular case accounting for continuous state spaces where the state transition of the underlying Markov decision process is subject to model uncertainty. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chung I Lu , Julian Sester , Aijia Zhang

$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. It is widely believed that $Q$-learning with linear function approximation (i.e., linear $Q$-learning) suffers from possible divergence until the recent work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xinyu Liu , Zixuan Xie , Shangtong Zhang

Q-learning is widely recognized as an effective approach for synthesizing controllers to achieve specific goals. However, handling challenges posed by continuous state-action spaces remains an ongoing research focus. This paper presents a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-07 Sadek Belamfedel Alaoui , Adnane Saoud

In temporal difference (TD) learning, off-policy sampling is known to be more practical than on-policy sampling, and by decoupling learning from data collection, it enables data reuse. It is known that policy evaluation (including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri , Sanjay Shakkottai , Karthikeyan Shanmugam

Decision-theoretic planning is a popular approach to sequential decision making problems, because it treats uncertainty in sensing and acting in a principled way. In single-agent frameworks like MDPs and POMDPs, planning can be carried out…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-11-02 Frans A. Oliehoek , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Nikos Vlassis

This paper studies the q-learning, recently coined as the continuous time counterpart of Q-learning by Jia and Zhou (2023), for continuous time Mckean-Vlasov control problems in the setting of entropy-regularized reinforcement learning. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Xiaoli Wei , Xiang Yu

This paper discusses a new approach to the fundamental problem of learning optimal Q-functions. In this approach, optimal Q-functions are formulated as saddle points of a nonlinear Lagrangian function derived from the classic Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Huang Bojun

We present an efficient algorithm for model-free episodic reinforcement learning on large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on a novel $Q$-learning policy with adaptive data-driven discretization. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Sean R. Sinclair , Siddhartha Banerjee , Christina Lee Yu

In this letter, we discuss the problem of optimal control for affine systems in the context of data-driven linear programming. First, we introduce a unified framework for the fixed point characterization of the value function, Q-function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-12 Andrea Martinelli , Matilde Gargiani , Marina Draskovic , John Lygeros

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Aviral Kumar , Aurick Zhou , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Ilya Sutskever , Sergey Levine