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Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

This paper investigates a type of instability that is linked to the greedy policy improvement in approximated reinforcement learning. We show empirically that non-deterministic policy improvement can stabilize methods like LSPI by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-23 Wendelin Böhmer , Rong Guo , Klaus Obermayer

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

We introduce a continuous policy-value iteration algorithm where the approximations of the value function of a stochastic control problem and the optimal control are simultaneously updated through Langevin-type dynamics. This framework…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-11 Qi Feng , Gu Wang

In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Rui Zhao , Xudong Sun , Volker Tresp

Deep reinforcement learning is an increasingly popular technique for synthesising policies to control an agent's interaction with its environment. There is also growing interest in formally verifying that such policies are correct and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Edoardo Bacci , David Parker

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Denis Belomestny , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov

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 algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sagalpreet Singh , Rishi Saket , Aravindan Raghuveer

Designing a stabilizing controller for nonlinear systems is a challenging task, especially for high-dimensional problems with unknown dynamics. Traditional reinforcement learning algorithms applied to stabilization tasks tend to drive the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Thanin Quartz , Ruikun Zhou , Hans De Sterck , Jun Liu

In Reinforcement Learning, the optimal action at a given state is dependent on policy decisions at subsequent states. As a consequence, the learning targets evolve with time and the policy optimization process must be efficient at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Romain Laroche , Remi Tachet

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms tend to achieve higher sample efficiency than model-free methods. However, due to the inevitable errors of learned models, model-based methods struggle to achieve the same asymptotic performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Qi Zhou , Houqiang Li , Jie Wang

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

In recent years, deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be adept at solving sequential decision processes with high-dimensional state spaces such as in the Atari games. Many reinforcement learning problems, however, involve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Yiming Zhang , Quan Ho Vuong , Kenny Song , Xiao-Yue Gong , Keith W. Ross

An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-19 Boris Belousov , Jan Peters

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We study best-policy identification for finite-horizon risk-sensitive reinforcement learning under the entropic risk measure. Recent work established a constant gap in the exponential horizon dependence between lower and upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Amer Essakine , Claire Vernade

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