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This paper investigates a model-free solution to the stochastic linear quadratic regulation (LQR) problem for linear discrete-time systems with both multiplicative and additive noises. We formulate the stochastic LQR problem as a nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-25 Jing Guo , Xiushan Jiang , Weihai Zhang

Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) design is one of the most classical optimal control problems, whose well-known solution is an input sequence expressed as a state-feedback. In this work, finite-horizon and discrete-time LQR is solved under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-17 Anna Scampicchio , Aleksandr Aravkin , Gianluigi Pillonetto

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

Under interpolation-type assumptions such as the strong growth condition, stochastic optimization methods can attain convergence rates comparable to full-batch methods, but their performance, particularly for SGD, remains highly sensitive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-16 Aike Yang , Hao Wang

This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear system and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. In this general…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-04 Deyue Li

We study the exploration-exploitation dilemma in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) setting. Inspired by the extended value iteration algorithm used in optimistic algorithms for finite MDPs, we propose to relax the optimistic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-14 Marc Abeille , Alessandro Lazaric

This paper presents a one-shot learning approach with performance and robustness guarantees for the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control of stochastic linear systems. Even though data-based LQR control has been widely considered,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-29 Ramin Esmzad , Hamidreza Modares

The convergence of policy gradient algorithms in reinforcement learning hinges on the optimization landscape of the underlying optimal control problem. Theoretical insights into these algorithms can often be acquired from analyzing those of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Jingliang Duan , Wenhan Cao , Yang Zheng , Lin Zhao

Actor-critic methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various challenging tasks. However, theoretical understandings of their performance remain elusive and challenging. Existing studies mostly focus on practically uncommon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Xuyang Chen , Jingliang Duan , Lin Zhao

We analyze offline designs of linear quadratic regulator (LQR) strategies with uncertain disturbances. First, we consider the scenario where the exogenous variable can be estimated in a controlled environment, and subsequently, consider a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-26 Sayak Mukherjee , Ramij R. Hossain , Mahantesh Halappanavar

Recent literature has made much progress in understanding \emph{online LQR}: a modern learning-theoretic take on the classical control problem in which a learner attempts to optimally control an unknown linear dynamical system with fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Max Simchowitz

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Maryam Fazel , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Mehran Mesbahi

While the techniques in optimal control theory are often model-based, the policy optimization (PO) approach directly optimizes the performance metric of interest. Even though it has been an essential approach for reinforcement learning…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-23 Feiran Zhao , Keyou You , Tamer Başar

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

A method is presented for solving the discrete-time finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem subject to auxiliary linear equality constraints, such as fixed end-point constraints. The method explicitly determines an affine…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Forrest Laine , Claire Tomlin

We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Dhruv Malik , Ashwin Pananjady , Kush Bhatia , Koulik Khamaru , Peter L. Bartlett , Martin J. Wainwright

This paper is concerned with a kind of linear-quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem of backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE) with partial information. The cost functional includes cross terms between the state and control, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Jialong Li , Zhiyong Yu , Wanying Yue

First order policy optimization has been widely used in reinforcement learning. It guarantees to find the optimal policy for the state-feedback linear quadratic regulator (LQR). However, the performance of policy optimization remains…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-05 Yang Zheng , Yue Sun , Maryam Fazel , Na Li

We introduce a new problem setting for continuous control called the LQR with Rich Observations, or RichLQR. In our setting, the environment is summarized by a low-dimensional continuous latent state with linear dynamics and quadratic…

We study time-inhomogeneous episodic reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation and sparse rewards. We design a new algorithm, Variance-weighted Optimistic $Q$-Learning (VO$Q$L), based on $Q$-learning and bound its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Alekh Agarwal , Yujia Jin , Tong Zhang