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Reinforcement learning (RL) actor-critic algorithms enable autonomous learning but often require a large number of environment interactions, which limits their applicability in robotics. Leveraging expert data can reduce the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Andreas Kernbach , Amr Elsheikh , Nicolas Grupp , René Nagel , Marco F. Huber

In many robotic applications, some aspects of the system dynamics can be modeled accurately while others are difficult to obtain or model. We present a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for continuous state and action spaces that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Tomoki Nishi , Prashant Doshi , Michael R. James , Danil Prokhorov

Traditional continuous deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ deterministic or unimodal Gaussian actors, which cannot express complex multimodal decision distributions. This limitation can hinder their performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ziqi Wang , Jiashun Liu , Ling Pan

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 2022-07-20 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

In this paper we propose a hybrid architecture of actor-critic algorithms for reinforcement learning in parameterized action space, which consists of multiple parallel sub-actor networks to decompose the structured action space into simpler…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Zhou Fan , Rui Su , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

Control contraction metrics (CCMs) provide a framework to co-synthesize a controller and a corresponding contraction metric -- a positive-definite Riemannian metric under which a closed-loop system is guaranteed to be incrementally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Minjae Cho , Hiroyasu Tsukamoto , Huy Trong Tran

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based algorithm to jointly train (1) a trajectory planner and (2) a tracking controller in a layered control architecture. Our algorithm arises naturally from a rewrite of the underlying optimal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-18 Fengjun Yang , Nikolai Matni

Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Ruofan Wu , Junmin Zhong , Jennie Si

In complex environments with high dimension, training a reinforcement learning (RL) model from scratch often suffers from lengthy and tedious collection of agent-environment interactions. Instead, leveraging expert demonstration to guide RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Zhaorun Chen , Binhao Chen , Shenghan Xie , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Junping Zhang

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Tuomas Haarnoja , Aurick Zhou , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Many existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods employ stochastic gradient iteration on the back end, whose stability hinges upon a hypothesis that the data-generating process mixes exponentially fast with a rate parameter that appears in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Wesley A. Suttle , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhrij Patel , Brian M. Sadler , Alec Koppel , Dinesh Manocha

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Reinforcement learning constantly deals with hard integrals, for example when computing expectations in policy evaluation and policy iteration. These integrals are rarely analytically solvable and typically estimated with the Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Sebastien M. R. Arnold , Pierre L'Ecuyer , Liyu Chen , Yi-fan Chen , Fei Sha

Many real-world control problems, ranging from finance to robotics, evolve in continuous time with non-uniform, event-driven decisions. Standard discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL), based on fixed-step Bellman updates, struggles in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Minh Nguyen

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that generates proposals for a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm by simulating the dynamics of a Hamiltonian system. However, HMC is sensitive to large time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-15 Xiaoyu Lu , Valerio Perrone , Leonard Hasenclever , Yee Whye Teh , Sebastian J. Vollmer

Policy gradient methods have become popular in multi-agent reinforcement learning, but they suffer from high variance due to the presence of environmental stochasticity and exploring agents (i.e., non-stationarity), which is potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Yuchen Xiao , Xueguang Lyu , Christopher Amato

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to challenging continuous control domains. However, poor sample efficiency prevents these methods from being widely used in real-world domains. This paper introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Sicen Li , Qinyun Tang , Yiming Pang , Xinmeng Ma , Gang Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang