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Related papers: Policy Gradient in Robust MDPs with Global Converg…

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Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have received significant research interest, offering an alternative to standard Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that often assume fixed transition probabilities. RMDPs address this by optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Xinyi Ni , Lifeng Lai

Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Shutong Ding , Jingya Wang , Yali Du , Ye Shi

In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-14 Santiago Paternain , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Alejandro Ribeiro

Robust reinforcement learning is essential for deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in real-world scenarios where environmental uncertainty predominates. Traditional robust reinforcement learning often depends on rectangularity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Adil Zouitine , David Bertoin , Pierre Clavier , Matthieu Geist , Emmanuel Rachelson

Multi-model Markov decision process (MMDP) is a promising framework for computing policies that are robust to parameter uncertainty in MDPs. MMDPs aim to find a policy that maximizes the expected return over a distribution of MDP models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Xihong Su , Marek Petrik

Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Tetsuro Morimura , Kazuhiro Ota , Kenshi Abe , Peinan Zhang

We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Avik Kar , Siddharth Chandak , Rahul Singh , Soumitra Sinhahajari , Eric Moulines , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Nicholas Bambos

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Kaiqing Zhang , Xiangyuan Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

Although robotic applications increasingly demand versatile and dynamic object handling, most existing techniques are predominantly focused on grasp-based manipulation, limiting their applicability in non-prehensile tasks. To address this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hamidreza Raei , Elena De Momi , Arash Ajoudani

Standard Markov decision process (MDP) and reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the policy with respect to the expected gain. We propose an algorithm which enables to optimize an alternative objective: the probability that the gain is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Vincent Corlay , Jean-Christophe Sibel

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of control and decision-making tasks. However, RL agents often exhibit unstable or degraded performance when deployed in environments subject to unexpected external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

The classical policy gradient method is the theoretical and conceptual foundation of modern policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most rigorous analyses of such methods, particularly those establishing convergence guarantees,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano , Jonathan Lee , Peter Bartlett , Ofir Nachum

A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-18 K J Prabuchandran , Tejas Bodas , Theja Tulabandhula

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have achieved great success in solving many challenging tasks while their black-box nature hinders interpretability and real-world applicability, making it difficult for human experts to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Jingdi Chen , Hanhan Zhou , Yongsheng Mei , Carlee Joe-Wong , Gina Adam , Nathaniel D. Bastian , Tian Lan

Personalization in machine learning (ML) tailors models' decisions to the individual characteristics of users. While this approach has seen success in areas like recommender systems, its expansion into high-stakes fields such as healthcare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Dmitry Ivanov , Omer Ben-Porat

In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-07 Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Lucas Janson , Marco Pavone

We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Dongsheng Ding , Kaiqing Zhang , Jiali Duan , Tamer Başar , Mihailo R. Jovanović