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Current research suggests the use of a liner quadratic performance index for optimal control of regulators in various applications. Some examples include correcting the trajectory of rocket and air vehicles, vibration suppression of…

General Mathematics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Alexander Bolonkin , Robert Sierakowski

In this paper, we continue our study on a general time-inconsistent stochastic linear--quadratic (LQ) control problem originally formulated in [6]. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for equilibrium controls via a flow of…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2015-05-27 Ying Hu , Hanqing Jin , Xun Yu Zhou

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

We consider policy gradient algorithms for the indefinite least squares stationary optimal control, e.g., linear-quadratic-regulator (LQR) with indefinite state and input penalization matrices. Such a setup has important applications in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-13 Jingjing Bu , Mehran Mesbahi

The behaviour of a stochastic dynamical system may be largely influenced by those low-probability, yet extreme events. To address such occurrences, this paper proposes an infinite-horizon risk-constrained Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-30 Feiran Zhao , Keyou You , Tamer Basar

We provide the first known algorithm that provably achieves $\varepsilon$-optimality within $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\varepsilon)$ function evaluations for the discounted discrete-time LQR problem with unknown parameters, without relying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-18 Amirreza Neshaei Moghaddam , Alex Olshevsky , Bahman Gharesifard

We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Navdeep Kumar , Priyank Agrawal , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Yue Wu , Weitong Zhang , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Many problems in robotics involve multiple decision making agents. To operate efficiently in such settings, a robot must reason about the impact of its decisions on the behavior of other agents. Differential games offer an expressive…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-19 David Fridovich-Keil , Ellis Ratner , Lasse Peters , Anca D. Dragan , Claire J. Tomlin

We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Actor-critic methods integrating target networks have exhibited a stupendous empirical success in deep reinforcement learning. However, a theoretical understanding of the use of target networks in actor-critic methods is largely missing in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Anas Barakat , Pascal Bianchi , Julien Lehmann

Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Max Qiushi Lin , Reza Asad , Kevin Tan , Haque Ishfaq , Csaba Szepesvari , Sharan Vaswani

In this paper, we formulate a general time-inconsistent stochastic linear--quadratic (LQ) control problem. The time-inconsistency arises from the presence of a quadratic term of the expected state as well as a state-dependent term in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-11-04 Ying Hu , Hanqing Jin , Xun Yu Zhou

Feedback control problems involving autonomous quadratic systems are prevalent, yet there are only a limited number of software tools available for approximating their solution due to the complexity of the problem. This paper represents a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-09 Jeff Borggaard , Lizette Zietsman

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Dean Brandner , Sebastien Gros , Sergio Lucia , Sadegh Soudjani

We study the performance of the certainty equivalent controller on Linear Quadratic (LQ) control problems with unknown transition dynamics. We show that for both the fully and partially observed settings, the sub-optimality gap between the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-25 Horia Mania , Stephen Tu , Benjamin Recht

We investigate the problem of learning an $\epsilon$-approximate solution for the discrete-time Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem via a Stochastic Variance-Reduced Policy Gradient (SVRPG) approach. Whilst policy gradient methods have…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-20 Leonardo F. Toso , Han Wang , James Anderson

This paper is concerned with the linear quadratic (LQ) optimal control of continuous-time system with terminal state constraint. In particular, multiple agents exist in the system which can only access partial information of the matrix…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Wenjing Yang , Zhaorong Zhang , Juanjuan Xu

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic time-inconsistent linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems with control input constraints. These problems are investigated within the more general framework associated with random coefficients.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-03-29 Ying Hu , Jianhui Huang , Xun Li

This paper first presents necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of discrete time, mean-field, stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problems. Then, by introducing several sequences of bounded linear operators, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-07-25 Robert. J Elliott , Xun Li , Yuan-Hua Ni