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Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

Safety-critical learning requires policies that improve performance without leaving the safe operating regime. We study constrained policy learning where model parameters must satisfy rollout-based safety constraints that can be evaluated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Shengfan Cao , Francesco Borrelli , Eunhyek Joa

Coagent policy gradient algorithms (CPGAs) are reinforcement learning algorithms for training a class of stochastic neural networks called coagent networks. In this work, we prove that CPGAs converge to locally optimal policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-11 James E. Kostas , Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

In this paper, we propose World Model Policy Gradient (WMPG), an approach to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimates using learned world models (WM's). In WMPG, a WM is trained online and used to imagine trajectories. The imagined…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-30 Michal Nauman , Floris Den Hengst

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Policy Dual Averaging (PDA) offers a principled Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) framework that more naturally admits value function approximation than standard PMD, enabling the use of approximate advantage (or Q-) functions while retaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Ji Gao , Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan , Zhaohui Tong

Traditional model-based reinforcement learning approaches learn a model of the environment dynamics without explicitly considering how it will be used by the agent. In the presence of misspecified model classes, this can lead to poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Pierluca D'Oro , Alberto Maria Metelli , Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli

Stochastic optimization algorithms, particularly stochastic policy gradient (SPG), report significant success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, up to now, that how to speedily acquire an optimal solution for RL is still a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Haobin Zhang , Zhuang Yang

We propose a new sample-efficient methodology, called Supervised Policy Update (SPU), for deep reinforcement learning. Starting with data generated by the current policy, SPU formulates and solves a constrained optimization problem in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Quan Vuong , Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

Domain randomization (DR) enables sim-to-real transfer by training controllers on a distribution of simulated environments, with the goal of achieving robust performance in the real world. Although DR is widely used in practice and is often…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-01 Tesshu Fujinami , Bruce D. Lee , Nikolai Matni , George J. Pappas

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…

Policy-gradient methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are typically updated along a single stochastic gradient direction, leaving the rich local structure of the parameter space unexplored. Previous work has shown that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xinyu Zhang , Aishik Deb , Klaus Mueller

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ziheng Cheng , Xin Guo , Yufei Zhang

The hierarchical interaction between the actor and critic in actor-critic based reinforcement learning algorithms naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic interpretation. We adopt this viewpoint and model the actor and critic interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Liyuan Zheng , Tanner Fiez , Zane Alumbaugh , Benjamin Chasnov , Lillian J. Ratliff

Dynamic routing in software-defined networking (SDN) can be viewed as a centralized decision-making problem. Most of the existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents can address it, thanks to the deep neural network (DNN)incorporated.…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2020-04-22 Juan Chen , Zhiwen Xiao , Huanlai Xing , Penglin Dai , Shouxi Luo , Muhammad Azhar Iqbal

Reinforcement learning algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, and often performance on one task can be substantially improved by leveraging information (e.g., via pre-training) on other related tasks. In this work, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Jonathan Lebensold , William Hamilton , Borja Balle , Doina Precup

In this paper, we introduce a generalization of the standard Stackelberg Games (SGs) framework: Calibrated Stackelberg Games (CSGs). In CSGs, a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent who (contrary to standard SGs) does not have direct…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Nika Haghtalab , Chara Podimata , Kunhe Yang

Offline optimization is an emerging problem in many experimental engineering domains including protein, drug or aircraft design, where online experimentation to collect evaluation data is too expensive or dangerous. To avoid that, one has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Yassine Chemingui , Aryan Deshwal , Trong Nghia Hoang , Janardhan Rao Doppa

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Kaiqing Zhang , Alec Koppel , Hao Zhu , Tamer Başar

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro