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Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

Quadratic programming is a workhorse of modern nonlinear optimization, control, and data science. Although regularized methods offer convergence guarantees under minimal assumptions on the problem data, they can exhibit the slow…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-18 Jeremy Bertoncini , Alberto De Marchi , Matthias Gerdts , Simon Gottschalk

Many practical applications of online reinforcement learning require the satisfaction of safety constraints while learning about the unknown environment. In this work, we establish theoretical foundations for reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-30 Benjamin Schiffer , Lucas Janson

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Roland Stolz , Michael Eichelbeck , Matthias Althoff

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

We propose and analyze a reinforcement learning principle that approximates the Bellman equations by enforcing their validity only along an user-defined space of test functions. Focusing on applications to model-free offline RL with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

This paper is a study of reinforcement learning (RL) as an optimal-control strategy for control of nonlinear valves. It is evaluated against the PID (proportional-integral-derivative) strategy, using a unified framework. RL is an autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Rajesh Siraskar

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

Reinforcement learning (RL) is recognized as lacking generalization and robustness under environmental perturbations, which excessively restricts its application for real-world robotics. Prior work claimed that adding regularization to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Yuan Zhang , Jianhong Wang , Joschka Boedecker

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

We prove that a single-layer neural network trained with the Q-learning algorithm converges in distribution to a random ordinary differential equation as the size of the model and the number of training steps become large. Analysis of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Justin Sirignano , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Gaurav Gupta , Chenzhong Yin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Paul Bogdan

Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control typically employs distributions whose support covers the entire action space. In this work, we investigate the colloquially known phenomenon that trained agents often prefer actions at the…

We design a new iterative algorithm, called REINFORCE-OPT, for solving a general type of optimization problems. This algorithm parameterizes the solution search rule and iteratively updates the parameter using a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Chen Xu , Yun-Bin Zhao , Zhipeng Lu , Ye Zhang

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

In many real-world decision making problems, reaching an optimal decision requires taking into account a variable number of objects around the agent. Autonomous driving is a domain in which this is especially relevant, since the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-13 Maria Hügle , Gabriel Kalweit , Branka Mirchevska , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Changyu Chen , Ramesha Karunasena , Thanh Hong Nguyen , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham

Compared with model-based control and optimization methods, reinforcement learning (RL) provides a data-driven, learning-based framework to formulate and solve sequential decision-making problems. The RL framework has become promising due…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-29 Pouria Razzaghi , Amin Tabrizian , Wei Guo , Shulu Chen , Abenezer Taye , Ellis Thompson , Alexis Bregeon , Ali Baheri , Peng Wei