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Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Dongdong Li , Jiuxiang Dong

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

The optimal policy of a reinforcement learning problem is often discontinuous and non-smooth. I.e., for two states with similar representations, their optimal policies can be significantly different. In this case, representing the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Zhimin Hou , Kuangen Zhang , Yi Wan , Dongyu Li , Chenglong Fu , Haoyong Yu

Low-precision training has become a popular approach to reduce compute requirements, memory footprint, and energy consumption in supervised learning. In contrast, this promising approach has not yet enjoyed similarly widespread adoption…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Johan Bjorck , Xiangyu Chen , Christopher De Sa , Carla P. Gomes , Kilian Q. Weinberger

Policy gradient methods are an attractive approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their convergence properties and robustness in partially observable scenarios. However, there is a significant performance gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Bozhidar Vasilev , Tarun Gupta , Bei Peng , Shimon Whiteson

In the past decades, we have witnessed significant progress in the domain of autonomous driving. Advanced techniques based on optimization and reinforcement learning (RL) become increasingly powerful at solving the forward problem: given…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Zheng Wu , Liting Sun , Wei Zhan , Chenyu Yang , Masayoshi Tomizuka

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) have taken an iterative actor-critic approach involving off-policy evaluation. In this paper we show that simply doing one step of constrained/regularized policy improvement using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 David Brandfonbrener , William F. Whitney , Rajesh Ranganath , Joan Bruna

In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

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

Diffusion and flow matching have emerged as expressive policy classes in reinforcement learning, but their reliance on multi-step denoising imposes substantial computational overhead at inference time, which is particularly problematic in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Kyungyoon Kim , Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Byung-Jun Lee

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

The present study applies a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm to Active Flow Control (AFC) of a two-dimensional flow around a confined square cylinder. Specifically, the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm is employed to modulate…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2024-09-27 Wang Jia , Hang Xu

Reinforcement learning for control over continuous spaces typically uses high-entropy stochastic policies, such as Gaussian distributions, for local exploration and estimating policy gradient to optimize performance. Many robotic control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Ya-Chien Chang , Sicun Gao

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Pol Mestres , Arnau Marzabal , Jorge Cortés

Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Haque Ishfaq , Guangyuan Wang , Sami Nur Islam , Doina Precup

In distributed optimization, the practical problem-solving performance is essentially sensitive to algorithm selection, parameter setting, problem type and data pattern. Thus, it is often laborious to acquire a highly efficient method for a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Daokuan Zhu , Tianqi Xu , Jie Lu

Connected and Automated Hybrid Electric Vehicles have the potential to reduce fuel consumption and travel time in real-world driving conditions. The eco-driving problem seeks to design optimal speed and power usage profiles based upon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Zhaoxuan Zhu , Nicola Pivaro , Shobhit Gupta , Abhishek Gupta , Marcello Canova

In reinforcement learning (RL) research, it is common to assume access to direct online interactions with the environment. However in many real-world applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed offline dataset of logged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Yifan Wu , George Tucker , Ofir Nachum

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