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The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

We derive a policy gradient theorem for Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) objectives in finite-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL), generalizing the standard policy gradient theorem and encompassing distortion-based risk objectives as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Olivier Lepel , Anas Barakat

Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Pulkit Katdare , Anant Joshi , Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Yisong Yue , Animashree Anandkumar

We consider Markov Decision Problems defined over continuous state and action spaces, where an autonomous agent seeks to learn a map from its states to actions so as to maximize its long-term discounted accumulation of rewards. We address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-23 Alec Koppel , Ekaterina Tolstaya , Ethan Stump , Alejandro Ribeiro

Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-10 Shicong Cen , Yuejie Chi

We develop an approach for solving time-consistent risk-sensitive stochastic optimization problems using model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we assume agents assess the risk of a sequence of random variables using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-29 Milad Kazemi , Sadegh Soudjani

We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

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

Policy evaluation is a crucial step in many reinforcement-learning procedures, which estimates a value function that predicts states' long-term value under a given policy. In this paper, we focus on policy evaluation with linear function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-12 Simon S. Du , Jianshu Chen , Lihong Li , Lin Xiao , Dengyong Zhou

Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Adrien Bolland , Gilles Louppe , Damien Ernst

Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Amrit Singh Bedi , Anjaly Parayil , Junyu Zhang , Mengdi Wang , Alec Koppel

Maximising a cumulative reward function that is Markov and stationary, i.e., defined over state-action pairs and independent of time, is sufficient to capture many kinds of goals in a Markov decision process (MDP). However, not all goals…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Tom Zahavy , Brendan O'Donoghue , Guillaume Desjardins , Satinder Singh

Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure in financial engineering, energy systems, and supply chain management. In these domains, Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a long-run CVaR criterion effectively mitigate cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Qixin Wang , Hao Cao , Jian-Qiang Hu , Mingjie Hu , Li Xia

In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Jing Dong , Xin T. Tong

Policy gradient methods have enabled deep reinforcement learning (RL) to approach challenging continuous control problems, even when the underlying systems involve highly nonlinear dynamics that generate complex non-smooth optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Tao Wang , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou