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Recent developments in Reinforcement learning have significantly enhanced sequential decision-making in uncertain environments. Despite their strong performance guarantees, most existing work has focused primarily on improving the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-13 Bo Pan , Jianya Lu , Yafei Wang , Hao Li , Bei Jiang , Linglong Kong

Policy gradient algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning and belong to the class of approximate dynamic programming methods. This paper studies two key policy gradient algorithms, the Natural Policy Gradient and the Gauss-Newton…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-11 Bowen Song , Sebastien Gros , Andrea Iannelli

Policy optimization has drawn increasing attention in reinforcement learning, particularly in the context of derivative-free methods for linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problems with unknown dynamics. This paper focuses on characterizing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Weijian Li , Panagiotis Kounatidis , Zhong-Ping Jiang , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Motivated by recent advances of reinforcement learning and direct data-driven control, we propose policy gradient adaptive control (PGAC) for the linear quadratic regulator (LQR), which uses online closed-loop data to improve the control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Feiran Zhao , Alessandro Chiuso , Florian Dörfler

This article investigates the robustness of gradient descent algorithms under perturbations. The concept of small-disturbance input-to-state stability (ISS) for discrete-time nonlinear dynamical systems is introduced, along with its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-04 Leilei Cui , Zhong-Ping Jiang , Eduardo D. Sontag , Richard D. Braatz

In this paper, we investigate a model-free optimal control design that minimizes an infinite horizon average expected quadratic cost of states and control actions subject to a probabilistic risk or chance constraint using input-output data.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-11 Arunava Naha , Subhrakanti Dey

We consider the policy gradient adaptive control (PGAC) framework, which adaptively updates a control policy in real time, by performing data-based gradient descent steps on the linear quadratic regulator cost. This method has empirically…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-07 Felix Laurent , Feiran Zhao , Jaap Eising , Florian Dörfler

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-27 Christoph Reisinger , Wolfgang Stockinger , Yufei Zhang

In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, we want policies that reach desired states and then keep the controlled system within an acceptable region around the desired states over an indefinite period of time. This latter objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Brahma S. Pavse , Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen , Qiaomin Xie , Josiah P. Hanna

We investigate the problem of learning linear quadratic regulators (LQR) in a multi-task, heterogeneous, and model-free setting. We characterize the stability and personalization guarantees of a policy gradient-based (PG) model-agnostic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Leonardo F. Toso , Donglin Zhan , James Anderson , Han Wang

Consider a discrete-time Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem solved using policy gradient descent when the system matrices are unknown. The gradient is transmitted across a noisy channel over a finite time horizon using analog…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Ashwin Verma , Aritra Mitra , Lintao Ye , Vijay Gupta

The linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem has reemerged as an important theoretical benchmark for reinforcement learning-based control of complex dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces. In contrast with nearly all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-04 Benjamin Gravell , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Tyler Summers

Recent advances in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature have enabled roboticists to automatically train complex policies in simulated environments. However, due to the poor sample complexity of these methods, solving RL problems using…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Tyler Westenbroek , Fernando Castaneda , Ayush Agrawal , Shankar Sastry , Koushil Sreenath

We consider the Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (LQR) problem in terms of optimizing a real-valued matrix function over the set of feedback gains. Such a setup facilitates examining the implications of a natural initial-state independent…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-07-31 Jingjing Bu , Afshin Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Mehran Mesbahi

We consider the optimal regulation problem for nonlinear control-affine dynamical systems. Whereas the linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) considers optimal control of a linear system with quadratic cost function, we study polynomial systems…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-30 Nicholas A. Corbin , Boris Kramer

Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Yinbin Han , Meisam Razaviyayn , Renyuan Xu

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

We study the convergence of deterministic policy gradient algorithms in continuous state and action space for the prototypical Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem when the search space is not limited to the family of linear policies.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-15 Craig Xu Chen , Andrea Agazzi

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

Designing a stabilizing controller for nonlinear systems is a challenging task, especially for high-dimensional problems with unknown dynamics. Traditional reinforcement learning algorithms applied to stabilization tasks tend to drive the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-16 Thanin Quartz , Ruikun Zhou , Hans De Sterck , Jun Liu