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With the increasing availability of open-source robotic data, imitation learning has become a promising approach for both manipulation and locomotion. Diffusion models are now widely used to train large, generalized policies that predict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Shashank Hegde , Satyajeet Das , Gautam Salhotra , Gaurav S. Sukhatme

Differentiable simulators represent an environment's dynamics as a differentiable function. Within robotics and autonomous driving, this property is used in Analytic Policy Gradients (APG), which relies on backpropagating through the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Asen Nachkov , Danda Pani Paudel , Jan-Nico Zaech , Davide Scaramuzza , Luc Van Gool

In this paper, we revisit and improve the convergence of policy gradient (PG), natural PG (NPG) methods, and their variance-reduced variants, under general smooth policy parametrizations. More specifically, with the Fisher information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-17 Yanli Liu , Kaiqing Zhang , Tamer Başar , Wotao Yin

In Model Predictive Control (MPC), world models predict the future outcomes of various action proposals, which are then scored to guide the selection of the optimal action. For visuomotor MPC, the score function is a distance metric between…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Quanyi Li , Lan Feng , Haonan Zhang , Wuyang Li , Letian Wang , Alexandre Alahi , Harold Soh

This paper presents a novel method for accelerating path-planning tasks in unknown scenes with obstacles by utilizing Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs) with Gradient Penalty (GP) to approximate the distribution of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Jorge Ocampo Jimenez , Wael Suleiman

We study the estimation of policy gradients for continuous-time systems with known dynamics. By reframing policy learning in continuous-time, we show that it is possible construct a more efficient and accurate gradient estimator. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Samuel Ainsworth , Kendall Lowrey , John Thickstun , Zaid Harchaoui , Siddhartha Srinivasa

Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Thomas Spooner , Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh

Systematically including dynamically changing waypoints as desired discrete actions, for instance, resulting from superordinate task planning, has been challenging for online model predictive trajectory optimization with short planning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Florian Beck , Minh Nhat Vu , Christian Hartl-Nesic , Andreas Kugi

Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over $\mathbb{R}^d$ and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Carson Eisenach , Haichuan Yang , Ji Liu , Han Liu

We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Tyler Westenbroek , Jacob Levy , David Fridovich-Keil

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-04 Mao Hong , Zhengling Qi , Yanxun Xu

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL)-based learning approaches for wireless networks rely on expensive trial-and-error mechanisms and real-time feedback based on extensive environment interactions, which leads to low data efficiency and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Lingyi Wang , Rashed Shelim , Walid Saad , Naren Ramakrishnan

Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Yasuhiro Fujita , Shin-ichi Maeda

We explore building generative neural network models of popular reinforcement learning environments. Our world model can be trained quickly in an unsupervised manner to learn a compressed spatial and temporal representation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-10 David Ha , Jürgen Schmidhuber

This paper presents a novel method for accelerating path planning tasks in unknown scenes with obstacles by utilizing Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs) with Gradient Penalty (GP) to approximate the distribution of the free…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Jorge Ocampo Jimenez , Wael Suleiman

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Matteo Papini , Damiano Binaghi , Giuseppe Canonaco , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd