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Modern deep policy gradient methods achieve effective performance on simulated robotic tasks, but they all require large replay buffers or expensive batch updates, or both, making them incompatible for real systems with resource-limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Gautham Vasan , Mohamed Elsayed , Alireza Azimi , Jiamin He , Fahim Shariar , Colin Bellinger , Martha White , A. Rupam Mahmood

Pretrained foundation models have exhibited extraordinary in-context learning performance, allowing zero-shot generalization to new tasks not encountered during pretraining. In the case of reinforcement learning (RL), in-context RL (ICRL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Weiqin Chen , Santiago Paternain

Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yanwei Jia , Du Ouyang , Yufei Zhang

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

System stabilization via policy gradient (PG) methods has drawn increasing attention in both control and machine learning communities. In this paper, we study their convergence and sample complexity for stabilizing linear time-invariant…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-15 Feiran Zhao , Xingyun Fu , Keyou You

We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying

We introduce the technique of adaptive discretization to design an efficient model-based episodic reinforcement learning algorithm in large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on optimistic one-step value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Sean R. Sinclair , Tianyu Wang , Gauri Jain , Siddhartha Banerjee , Christina Lee Yu

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have been demonstrated to be effective in a wide range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from severe action oscillations in particular in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Chen Chen , Hongyao Tang , Jianye Hao , Wulong Liu , Zhaopeng Meng

Machine learning algorithms with empirical risk minimization are vulnerable under distributional shifts due to the greedy adoption of all the correlations found in training data. Recently, there are robust learning methods aiming at this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Jiashuo Liu , Zheyan Shen , Peng Cui , Linjun Zhou , Kun Kuang , Bo Li , Yishi Lin

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 softmax policy gradient (PG) method, which performs gradient ascent under softmax policy parameterization, is arguably one of the de facto implementations of policy optimization in modern reinforcement learning. For $\gamma$-discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Policy Gradient (STORM-PG), which operates a SARAH-type stochastic recursive variance-reduced policy gradient in an exponential moving average fashion.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-10 Huizhuo Yuan , Xiangru Lian , Ji Liu , Yuren Zhou

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on exploration to discover new behaviors, which is typically achieved by following a stochastic policy. In continuous control tasks, policies with a Gaussian distribution have been widely adopted.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Dmytro Korenkevych , A. Rupam Mahmood , Gautham Vasan , James Bergstra

Classical value iteration approaches are not applicable to environments with continuous states and actions. For such environments, the states and actions are usually discretized, which leads to an exponential increase in computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Michael Lutter , Shie Mannor , Jan Peters , Dieter Fox , Animesh Garg

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the setting of continuous time and space, for an infinite horizon with a discounted objective and the underlying dynamics driven by a stochastic differential equation. Built upon recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Hanyang Zhao , Wenpin Tang , David D. Yao

This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-04 Deyue Li

Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Firas Al-Hafez , Guoping Zhao , Jan Peters , Davide Tateo