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We introduce a learning method called ``gradient-based reinforcement planning'' (GREP). Unlike traditional DP methods that improve their policy backwards in time, GREP is a gradient-based method that plans ahead and improves its policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ivo Kwee , Marcus Hutter , Juergen Schmidhuber

Deep Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms employ value networks to drive the learning of parameterized policies and reduce the variance of the gradient estimates. However, value function approximation gets stuck in local optima and struggles to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Enrico Marchesini , Christopher Amato

In policy gradient reinforcement learning, access to a differentiable model enables 1st-order gradient estimation that accelerates learning compared to relying solely on derivative-free 0th-order estimators. However, discontinuous dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ku Onoda , Paavo Parmas , Manato Yaguchi , Yutaka Matsuo

Deep learning and reinforcement learning methods have recently been used to solve a variety of problems in continuous control domains. An obvious application of these techniques is dexterous manipulation tasks in robotics which are…

This paper proposes GProp, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous policies with compatible function approximation. The algorithm is based on two innovations. Firstly, we present a temporal-difference based method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-11 David Balduzzi , Muhammad Ghifary

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Haotian Lin , Pengcheng Wang , Jeff Schneider , Guanya Shi

Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Rui Liu , Alex Olshevsky

Real-world control systems require policies that are not only high-performing but also interpretable and robust. A promising direction toward this goal is model-based control, which learns system dynamics and cost functions from historical…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-20 Yuexin Bian , Jie Feng , Yuanyuan Shi

Policy gradient (PG) methods are the backbone of many reinforcement learning algorithms due to their good performance in policy optimization problems. As a gradient-based approach, PG methods typically rely on knowledge of the system…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Bowen Song , Andrea Iannelli

Conditioned Sequence Models (CSMs) learn policies by treating return-to-go (RTG) as a control signal. However, existing CSMs often treat the RTGs as simple numerical inputs rather than aligning them with the performance of their policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yuxiao Yang , Weitong Zhang

We introduce the first direct policy search algorithm which provably converges to the globally optimal $\textit{dynamic}$ filter for the classical problem of predicting the outputs of a linear dynamical system, given noisy, partial…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Jack Umenberger , Max Simchowitz , Juan C. Perdomo , Kaiqing Zhang , Russ Tedrake

This paper studies a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based actor critic (AC) reinforcement learning (RL) technique to control a linear discrete-time system with a quadratic control cost while ensuring a constraint on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-22 Arunava Naha , Subhrakanti Dey

In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Audrey Huang , Liu Leqi , Zachary C. Lipton , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Ján Drgoňa , Sayak Mukherjee , Aaron Tuor , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Draguna Vrabie

Many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are impractical for training in operational systems or computationally expensive high-fidelity simulations, as they require large amounts of data. Meanwhile, low-fidelity simulators, e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Xinjie Liu , Cyrus Neary , Kushagra Gupta , Wesley A. Suttle , Christian Ellis , Ufuk Topcu , David Fridovich-Keil

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

Policy gradient is an effective way to estimate continuous action on the environment. This paper, it about explaining the mathematical formula and code implementation. In the end, comparing between the rotation angle of the stick on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Mingwei Shi

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

The inputs and preferences of human users are important considerations in situations where these users interact with autonomous cyber or cyber-physical systems. In these scenarios, one is often interested in aligning behaviors of the system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Luyao Niu , Andrew Clark , Radha Poovendran

We introduce Phasic Policy Gradient (PPG), a reinforcement learning framework which modifies traditional on-policy actor-critic methods by separating policy and value function training into distinct phases. In prior methods, one must choose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Karl Cobbe , Jacob Hilton , Oleg Klimov , John Schulman