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Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…
Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…
The objective in a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) problem is to find a policy that optimizes the expected value of a performance metric such as the infinite-horizon cumulative discounted or long-run average cost/reward. In…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
Policy-based reinforcement learning currently plays an important role in improving LLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks. However, existing rollout-based reinforcement learning methods (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, etc.) fail to explicitly consider…
Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…
Learning to reach goal states and learning diverse skills through mutual information (MI) maximization have been proposed as principled frameworks for self-supervised reinforcement learning, allowing agents to acquire broadly applicable…
A one-step two-critic deep reinforcement learning (OSTC-DRL) approach for inverter-based volt-var control (IB-VVC) in active distribution networks is proposed in this paper. Firstly, considering IB-VVC can be formulated as a single-period…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet current methods face key challenges in resource allocation and policy optimization dynamics: (i) uniform rollout…
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…
Optimizing static risk-averse objectives in Markov decision processes is difficult because they do not admit standard dynamic programming equations common in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Dynamic programming decompositions that…
This paper introduces the Active-Importance-Sampling Actor-Critic (AISAC) algorithm, an extension of the Actor-Critic framework for reducing variance in policy gradient estimation. AISAC optimizes the behavior policy to minimize gradient…
Reinforcement learning constantly deals with hard integrals, for example when computing expectations in policy evaluation and policy iteration. These integrals are rarely analytically solvable and typically estimated with the Monte Carlo…
Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL.…
Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…
Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which…
Soft actor-critic (SAC) in reinforcement learning is expected to be one of the next-generation robot control schemes. Its ability to maximize policy entropy would make a robotic controller robust to noise and perturbation, which is useful…
Many reinforcement learning methods achieve great success in practice but lack theoretical foundation. In this paper, we study the convergence analysis on the problem of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The global linear convergence…
Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies are typically implemented with fixed control rates, often disregarding the impact of control rate selection. This can lead to inefficiencies as the optimal control rate varies with task…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a dominant paradigm for training autonomous agents, yet these agents often exhibit poor generalization, failing to adapt to scenarios not seen during training. In this work, we identify a fundamental cause of…