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Accurate knowledge of the distribution system topology and parameters is required to achieve good voltage controls, but this is difficult to obtain in practice. This paper develops a model-free approach based on the surrogate model and deep…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-26 Di Cao , Junbo Zhao , Weihao Hu , Fei Ding , Qi Huang , Zhe Chen , Frede Blaabjerg

Policy gradient (PG) methods are the backbone of many reinforcement learning algorithms due to their good performance in policy optimization problems. As a gradient-based approach, PG methods typically rely on knowledge of the system…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Bowen Song , Andrea Iannelli

Model-free approaches for reinforcement learning (RL) and continuous control find policies based only on past states and rewards, without fitting a model of the system dynamics. They are appealing as they are general purpose and easy to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Nevena Lazic , Csaba Szepesvari

This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear systems and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. A classical approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-11 Kai Du , Qingxin Meng , Fu Zhang

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

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

A classical approach for solving discrete time nonlinear control on a finite horizon consists in repeatedly minimizing linear quadratic approximations of the original problem around current candidate solutions. While widely popular in many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Vincent Roulet , Siddhartha Srinivasa , Maryam Fazel , Zaid Harchaoui

We consider the static output feedback control for Linear Quadratic Regulator problems with structured constraints under the assumption that system parameters are unknown. To solve the problem in the model free setting, we propose the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-21 Shokichi Takakura , Kazuhiro Sato

We address the tracking problem for a class of uncertain non-affine nonlinear systems with high relative degrees, performing non-repetitive tasks. We propose a rigorously proven, robust adaptive learning control scheme that relies on a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-03 Shuai Gao , Dong Shen , Abdelhamid Tayebi

We consider the Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (LQR) problem in terms of optimizing a real-valued matrix function over the set of feedback gains. Such a setup facilitates examining the implications of a natural initial-state independent…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-07-31 Jingjing Bu , Afshin Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Mehran Mesbahi

Gradient Descent (GD) and Conjugate Gradient (CG) methods are among the most effective iterative algorithms for solving unconstrained optimization problems, particularly in machine learning and statistical modeling, where they are employed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Xianqi Jiao , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

We study the asymmetric matrix factorization problem under a natural nonconvex formulation with arbitrary overparametrization. The model-free setting is considered, with minimal assumption on the rank or singular values of the observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Liwei Jiang , Yudong Chen , Lijun Ding

Many physical questions in fluid dynamics can be recast in terms of norm constrained optimisation problems; which in-turn, can be further recast as unconstrained problems on spherical manifolds. Due to the nonlinearities of the governing…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2024-01-17 Paul M Mannix , Calum S Skene , Didier Auroux , Florence Marcotte

This paper addresses continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) where the system dynamics are governed by an unknown stochastic differential equation, and only discrete-time observations are available. Existing approaches face…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Yuhua Zhu , Yuming Zhang , Haoyu Zhang

When an online learning algorithm is used to estimate the unknown parameters of a model, the signals interacting with the parameter estimates should not decay too quickly for the optimal values to be discovered correctly. This requirement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Kamil Nar , S. Shankar Sastry

Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Sergey Pankov

We present new policy mirror descent (PMD) methods for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems with either strongly convex or general convex regularizers. By exploring the structural properties of these overall highly nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Guanghui Lan

Differential equations in general and neural ODEs in particular are an essential technique in continuous-time system identification. While many deterministic learning algorithms have been designed based on numerical integration via the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-18 Lenart Treven , Philippe Wenk , Florian Dörfler , Andreas Krause

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for infinite horizon $\rm {H_{2}/H_{\infty}}$ problem in a class of stochastic discrete-time systems, rather than using a set of coupled generalized algebraic Riccati equations…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-28 Xiushan Jiang , Li Wang , Dongya Zhao , Ling Shi

Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient methods is a central problem in modern machine learning. Recent work has highlighted diagonal linear networks as a simplified yet expressive setting for analyzing the optimization and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Begoña García Malaxechebarría , Courtney Paquette , Maryam Fazel , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy