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We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Tyler Westenbroek , Jacob Levy , David Fridovich-Keil

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a general class of policy mirror descent methods, all with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Lin Xiao

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-01 Robert Denkert , Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments, particularly when system parameters are unknown. This paper investigates RL-based control for entropy-regularized…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-02 Gabriel Diaz , Lucky Li , Wenhao Zhang

State-of-the-art model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches either use gradient-free, population-based methods for planning, learned policy networks, or a combination of policy networks and planning. Hybrid approaches that combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jonathan Spieler , Sven Behnke

We prove convergence of the proximal policy gradient method for a class of constrained stochastic control problems with control in both the drift and diffusion of the state process. The problem requires either the running or terminal cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-27 Ashley Davey , Harry Zheng

Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Amirreza Valaei , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sadegh Soudjani

Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Shicong Cen , Chen Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi

Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Matthew S. Zhang , Murat A. Erdogdu , Animesh Garg

We consider the continuous-time Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (LQR) problem in terms of optimizing a real-valued matrix function over the set of feedback gains. The results developed are in parallel to those in Bu et al. [1] for discrete-time…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-17 Jingjing Bu , Afshin Mesbahi , Mehran Mesbahi

We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Navdeep Kumar , Yashaswini Murthy , Itai Shufaro , Kfir Y. Levy , R. Srikant , Shie Mannor

Feedback optimization is an increasingly popular control paradigm to optimize dynamical systems, accounting for control objectives that concern the system operation at steady-state. Existing feedback optimization techniques heavily rely on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Amir Mehrnoosh , Gianluca Bianchin

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods for finding optimal policies in linear quadratic (LQ) mean field control (MFC) problems over an infinite horizon in continuous time, with common noise and entropy regularization. We study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-06 Noufel Frikha , Huyên Pham , Xuanye Song

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…

Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular and efficient for large-scale reinforcement learning due to their relative stability and incremental nature. In recent years, the empirical success of PG methods has led to the development of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Javad Lavaei

We develop a model-free approach to optimally control stochastic, Markovian systems subject to a reach-avoid constraint. Specifically, the state trajectory must remain within a safe set while reaching a target set within a finite time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

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

We consider the static output feedback control for Linear Quadratic Regulator problems with structured constraints under the assumption that system parameters are unknown. To solve the problem in the model free setting, we propose the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-21 Shokichi Takakura , Kazuhiro Sato