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In this paper we investigate the convergence of the Policy Iteration Algorithm (PIA) for a class of general continuous-time entropy-regularized stochastic control problems. In particular, instead of employing sophisticated PDE estimates for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-24 Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang , Jianfeng Zhang

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

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

Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Matthew S. Zhang , Murat A. Erdogdu , Animesh Garg

Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Chenggang Wang , Roni Khardon

Policy robustness in Reinforcement Learning may not be desirable at any cost: the alterations caused by robustness requirements from otherwise optimal policies should be explainable, quantifiable and formally verifiable. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Licio Romao , Lewis Hammond , Manuel Mazo , Alessandro Abate

Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Denis Belomestny , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov

The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-01 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenshuo Zhang , Minxuan Duan , Youran Ye , Hongyang R. Zhang

Behavior Regularized Policy Optimization (BRPO) leverages asymmetric (divergence) regularization to mitigate the distribution shift in offline Reinforcement Learning. This paper is the first to study the open question of symmetric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Lingwei Zhu , Haseeb Shah , Zheng Chen , Yukie Nagai , Martha White

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Navdeep Kumar , Kfir Levy , Kaixin Wang , Shie Mannor

High level declarative constraints provide a powerful (and popular) way to define and construct control policies; however, most synthesis algorithms do not support specifying the degree of randomness (unpredictability) of the resulting…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Marcell Vazquez-Chanlatte , Sebastian Junges , Daniel J. Fremont , Sanjit Seshia

Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL) consists in training a policy using trajectories collected with another policy, called the behavioural policy. Safe policy improvement (SPI) provides guarantees with high probability that the trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Kimia Nadjahi , Romain Laroche , Rémi Tachet des Combes

Given a dataset of expert demonstrations, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward for which the expert is optimal. This work proposes a model-free algorithm to solve entropy-regularized IRL problem. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Titouan Renard , Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Cumulative entropy regularization introduces a regulatory signal to the reinforcement learning (RL) problem that encourages policies with high-entropy actions, which is equivalent to enforcing small deviations from a uniform reference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Felix Leibfried , Jordi Grau-Moya

Flow $Q$-learning has recently been introduced to integrate learning from expert demonstrations into an actor-critic structure. Central to this innovation is the ``the one-step policy'' network, which is optimized through a $Q$-function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-17 Farnaz Adib Yaghmaie , Arunava Naha

Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-06-17 Yinlam Chow , Marek Petrik , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill