English
Related papers

Related papers: Compatible features for Monotonic Policy Improveme…

200 papers

We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Ming Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Group-based reinforcement learning methods, like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), are widely used nowadays to post-train large language models. Despite their empirical success, they exhibit structural mismatches between reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Aleksandar Fontana , Marco Simoni , Giulio Rossolini , Andrea Saracino , Paolo Mori

Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Max Qiushi Lin , Reza Asad , Kevin Tan , Haque Ishfaq , Csaba Szepesvari , Sharan Vaswani

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Andrea Zanette , Ching-An Cheng , Alekh Agarwal

Preference-conditioned multi-objective reinforcement learning aims to learn a single policy that captures trade-offs across preferences, but under nonlinear scalarization the uniqueness and continuity of the preference-to-solution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Akihiro Kubo , Kosuke Nakanishi , Shin Ishii

In this paper, we present a novel algorithm named synchronous integral Q-learning, which is based on synchronous policy iteration, to solve the continuous-time infinite horizon optimal control problems of input-affine system dynamics. The…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-05-20 Lei Guo , Han Zhao

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) is a dominant paradigm for improving pretrained policies for downstream tasks. These pretrained policies, trained on large datasets, produce generations with a broad range of promising but unrefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jubayer Ibn Hamid , Ifdita Hasan Orney , Ellen Xu , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh

Cooperative multi-agent tasks require agents to deduce their own contributions with shared global rewards, known as the challenge of credit assignment. General methods for policy based multi-agent reinforcement learning to solve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Lipeng Wan , Xuwei Song , Xuguang Lan , Nanning Zheng

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

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Leonid Peshkin , Christian R. Shelton

Very recently proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms have been proposed as first-order optimization methods for effective reinforcement learning. While PPO is inspired by the same learning theory that justifies trust region policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-20 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng , Mengjie Zhang

Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Yinbin Han , Meisam Razaviyayn , Renyuan Xu

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Navdeep Kumar , Kaixin Wang , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-01-04 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Sharan Vaswani , Amirreza Kazemi , Reza Babanezhad , Nicolas Le Roux

We consider the problem of finding a policy that maximizes an expected reward throughout the trajectory of an agent that interacts with an unknown environment. Frequently denoted Reinforcement Learning, this framework suffers from the need…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-30 Juan Cervino , Harshat Kumar , Alejandro Ribeiro