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Reinforcement Learning (RL) robot controllers usually aggregate many task objectives into one scalar reward. While large-scale proximal policy optimisation (PPO) has enabled impressive results such as robust robot locomotion in the real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Humphrey Munn , Brendan Tidd , Peter Böhm , Marcus Gallagher , David Howard

In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

The paper investigates stochastic resource allocation problems with scarce, reusable resources and non-preemtive, time-dependent, interconnected tasks. This approach is a natural generalization of several standard resource management…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-01-16 Balázs Csanád Csáji , László Monostori

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

Actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have recently achieved prominent success in tackling various challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems, particularly complex control tasks with high-dimensional continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Gang Chen , Victoria Huang

Decision-making for engineering systems can be efficiently formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) or a Partially Observable MDP (POMDP). Typical MDP and POMDP solution procedures utilize offline knowledge about the environment and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-11-07 C. P. Andriotis , K. G. Papakonstantinou

The option framework has shown great promise by automatically extracting temporally-extended sub-tasks from a long-horizon task. Methods have been proposed for concurrently learning low-level intra-option policies and high-level option…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Chenghao Li , Xiaoteng Ma , Chongjie Zhang , Jun Yang , Li Xia , Qianchuan Zhao

We consider a class of hierarchical multi-agent optimization problems over networks where agents seek to compute an approximate solution to a single-stage stochastic mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). MPECs subsume…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-14 Mohammadjavad Ebrahimi , Uday V. Shanbhag , Farzad Yousefian

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which updates the model parameters by adding a local gradient times a learning rate at each step, is widely used in model training of machine learning algorithms such as neural networks. It is observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-01 Chang Xu , Tao Qin , Gang Wang , Tie-Yan Liu

Deterministic and Stochastic techniques in Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep-RL) have become a promising solution to improve motion control and the decision-making tasks for a wide variety of robots. Previous works showed that these Deep-RL…

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have emerged as powerful tools for solving complex optimization problems characterized by multiple, often conflicting, objectives. While advancements have been made in computational efficiency…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Zherui Zhang , Fan Yang , Ran Cheng , Yuxin Ma

Iterative optimization is central to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and provides a crucial framework for understanding adaptive systems. This review provides a unified perspective on this subject, bridging classic theory with neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jesús García Fernández , Nasir Ahmad , Marcel van Gerven

Reinforcement learning (RL) in low-data and risk-sensitive domains requires performant and flexible deployment policies that can readily incorporate constraints during deployment. One such class of policies are the semi-parametric H-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Harshit Sikchi , Wenxuan Zhou , David Held

We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Honghao Wei , Xiyue Peng , Arnob Ghosh , Xin Liu

One of the main goals of reinforcement learning (RL) is to provide a~way for physical machines to learn optimal behavior instead of being programmed. However, effective control of the machines usually requires fine time discretization. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Jakub Łyskawa , Paweł Wawrzyński

We study risk-sensitive RL where the goal is learn a history-dependent policy that optimizes some risk measure of cumulative rewards. We consider a family of risks called the optimized certainty equivalents (OCE), which captures important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Kaiwen Wang , Dawen Liang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

Combinatorial optimization problems are notoriously challenging due to their discrete structure and exponentially large solution space. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have enabled the learning heuristics directly from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Shengda Gu , Kai Li , Junliang Xing , Yifan Zhang , Jian Cheng

This paper presents a novel algorithm for the continuous control of dynamical systems that combines Trajectory Optimization (TO) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a single framework. The motivations behind this algorithm are the two main…

The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Blossom Metevier , Philip S. Thomas