English
Related papers

Related papers: Convergence and Sample Complexity of Policy Gradie…

200 papers

In recent years, stabilizing unknown dynamical systems has became a critical problem in control systems engineering. Addressing this for linear time-invariant (LTI) systems is an essential fist step towards solving similar problems for more…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Xinpei Zhang , Guangyan Jia

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

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

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

This paper studies the robustness of reinforcement learning algorithms to errors in the learning process. Specifically, we revisit the benchmark problem of discrete-time linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and study the long-standing open…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-16 Bo Pang , Zhong-Ping Jiang

We study the global linear convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods for finite-horizon continuous-time exploratory linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems. The setting includes stochastic LQC problems with indefinite costs and allows…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-05 Michael Giegrich , Christoph Reisinger , Yufei Zhang

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

Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Junyu Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Zheng Yu , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

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

This paper focuses on adaptive control of the discrete-time linear quadratic regulator (adaptive LQR). Recent literature has made significant contributions in proving non-asymptotic convergence rates, but existing approaches have a few…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-27 Peter A. Fisher , Anuradha M. Annaswamy

The principal task to control dynamical systems is to ensure their stability. When the system is unknown, robust approaches are promising since they aim to stabilize a large set of plausible systems simultaneously. We study linear…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-24 Lenart Treven , Sebastian Curi , Mojmir Mutny , Andreas Krause

We address the problem of model-free distributed stabilization of heterogeneous multi-agent systems using reinforcement learning (RL). Two algorithms are developed. The first algorithm solves a centralized linear quadratic regulator (LQR)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-09 Gangshan Jing , He Bai , Jemin George , Aranya Chakrabortty , Piyush K. Sharma

Although it is relatively easy to apply, the gradient method often displays a disappointingly slow rate of convergence. Its convergence is specially based on the structure of the matrix of the algebraic linear system, and on the choice of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-06-03 Ibrahima Dione

A common pipeline in learning-based control is to iteratively estimate a model of system dynamics, and apply a trajectory optimization algorithm - e.g.~$\mathtt{iLQR}$ - on the learned model to minimize a target cost. This paper conducts a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Daniel Pfrommer , Max Simchowitz , Tyler Westenbroek , Nikolai Matni , Stephen Tu

Stabilizing an unknown dynamical system is one of the central problems in control theory. In this paper, we study the sample complexity of the learn-to-stabilize problem in Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems on a single trajectory. Current…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-16 Yang Hu , Adam Wierman , Guannan Qu

This paper revisits and extends the convergence and robustness properties of value and policy iteration algorithms for discrete-time linear quadratic regulator problems. In the model-based case, we extend current results concerning the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-11 Bowen Song , Chenxuan Wu , Andrea Iannelli

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

ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Zhaoran Wang , Tuo Zhao

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

In this paper, we investigate a data-driven framework to solve Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problems when the dynamics is unknown, with the additional challenge of providing stability certificates for the overall learning and control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-13 Lorenzo Sforni , Guido Carnevale , Ivano Notarnicola , Giuseppe Notarstefano