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We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…
We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…
We study the problem of joint optimization involving coding and control policies for a controlled Markovian sytem over a finite-rate noiseless communication channel. While structural results on the optimal encoding and control have been…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
We consider a new form of reinforcement learning (RL) that is based on opportunities to directly learn the optimal control policy and a general Markov decision process (MDP) framework devised to support these opportunities. Derivations of…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems,…
Selecting the best hyperparameters for a particular optimization instance, such as the learning rate and momentum, is an important but nonconvex problem. As a result, iterative optimization methods such as hypergradient descent lack global…
Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov…
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and trajectory optimization (TO) present strong complementary advantages. On one hand, RL approaches are able to learn global control policies directly from data, but generally require large sample sizes to…
Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…
Projected Gradient Descent denotes a class of iterative methods for solving optimization programs. Its applicability to convex optimization programs has gained significant popularity for its intuitive implementation that involves only…
This paper proposes a scalable distributed policy gradient method and proves its convergence to near-optimal solution in multi-agent linear quadratic networked systems. The agents engage within a specified network under local communication…
This paper studies the data-driven synthesis of linear quadratic integral (LQI) controllers for continuous-time systems. The objective is to achieve optimal state-feedback control with integral action for reference tracking using only…
Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In…
We propose a new technique that boosts the convergence of training generative adversarial networks. Generally, the rate of training deep models reduces severely after multiple iterations. A key reason for this phenomenon is that a deep…
There are much recent interests in solving noncovnex min-max optimization problems due to its broad applications in many areas including machine learning, networked resource allocations, and distributed optimization. Perhaps, the most…
We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…
We present an approach for approximately solving discrete-time stochastic optimal-control problems by combining direct trajectory optimization, deterministic sampling, and policy optimization. Our feedback motion-planning algorithm uses a…
This paper studies the linear quadratic regulation (LQR) problem of unknown discrete-time systems via dynamic output feedback learning control. In contrast to the state feedback, the optimality of the dynamic output feedback control for…