English
Related papers

Related papers: Convergence of policy gradient methods for finite-…

200 papers

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

System stabilization via policy gradient (PG) methods has drawn increasing attention in both control and machine learning communities. In this paper, we study their convergence and sample complexity for stabilizing linear time-invariant…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-15 Feiran Zhao , Xingyun Fu , Keyou You

In this paper, we study the global convergence of model-based and model-free policy gradient descent and natural policy gradient descent algorithms for linear quadratic deep structured teams. In such systems, agents are partitioned into a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Vida Fathi , Jalal Arabneydi , Amir G. Aghdam

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

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

A classical approach for solving discrete time nonlinear control on a finite horizon consists in repeatedly minimizing linear quadratic approximations of the original problem around current candidate solutions. While widely popular in many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Vincent Roulet , Siddhartha Srinivasa , Maryam Fazel , Zaid Harchaoui

Recently, the impressive empirical success of policy gradient (PG) methods has catalyzed the development of their theoretical foundations. Despite the huge efforts directed at the design of efficient stochastic PG-type algorithms, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Anas Barakat , Anastasia Kireeva , Niao He

We analyze independent policy-gradient (PG) learning in $N$-player linear-quadratic (LQ) stochastic differential games. Each player employs a distributed policy that depends only on its own state and updates the policy independently using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-19 Philipp Plank , Yufei Zhang

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) tackles sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints, which are often formulated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We consider the problem of finite-horizon optimal control of a discrete linear time-varying system subject to a stochastic disturbance and fully observable state. The initial state of the system is drawn from a known Gaussian distribution,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-08 Maxim Goldshtein , Panagiotis Tsiotras

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a general class of policy mirror descent methods, all with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Lin Xiao

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Kaiqing Zhang , Alec Koppel , Hao Zhu , Tamer Başar

We study the convergence of several natural policy gradient (NPG) methods in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with regular policy parametrizations. For a variety of NPGs and reward functions we show that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-21 Johannes Müller , Guido Montúfar

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

We consider policy gradient methods for stochastic optimal control problem in continuous time. In particular, we analyze the gradient flow for the control, viewed as a continuous time limit of the policy gradient method. We prove the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-15 Mo Zhou , Jianfeng Lu

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Xin Chen , Yifan Hu , Minda Zhao

Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Jie Feng , Ke Wei , Jinchi Chen

Reinforcement learning is a powerful tool to learn the optimal policy of possibly multiple agents by interacting with the environment. As the number of agents grow to be very large, the system can be approximated by a mean-field problem.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-18 Weichen Wang , Jiequn Han , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

In this paper we investigate the convergence of the Policy Iteration Algorithm (PIA) for a class of general continuous-time entropy-regularized stochastic control problems. In particular, instead of employing sophisticated PDE estimates for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-24 Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang , Jianfeng Zhang