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We propose a novel actor-critic algorithm with guaranteed convergence to an optimal policy for a discounted reward Markov decision process. The actor incorporates a descent direction that is motivated by the solution of a certain non-linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-30 Prashanth L. A. , H. L. Prasad , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Prakash Chandra

The automatic synthesis of a policy through reinforcement learning (RL) from a given set of formal requirements depends on the construction of a reward signal and consists of the iterative application of many policy-improvement steps. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Luigi Berducci , Radu Grosu

Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Rui Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alex X. Lee , Anusha Nagabandi , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications in real-world scenarios must prioritize safety and reliability, which impose strict constraints on agent behavior. Model-based RL leverages predictive world models for action planning and policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Artem Latyshev , Gregory Gorbov , Aleksandr I. Panov

We propose WSAC (Weighted Safe Actor-Critic), a novel algorithm for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) under functional approximation, which can robustly optimize policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy with limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Honghao Wei , Xiyue Peng , Arnob Ghosh , Xin Liu

We work towards a unifying paradigm for accelerating policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating foresight in the policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates. Leveraging the connection between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Veronica Chelu , Tom Zahavy , Arthur Guez , Doina Precup , Sebastian Flennerhag

This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to solve the risk-averse optimal control (RAOC) problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems. While successful RL algorithms have been presented to learn optimal control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-29 Yuzhen Han , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the de facto method for achieving locomotion on humanoid robots in practice, yet stability analysis of the corresponding control policies is lacking. Recent work has attempted to merge control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-07 Zachary Olkin , William D. Compton , Aaron D. Ames

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in robotic control; however, state-of-the-art policy learning methods, such as actor-critic methods, still suffer from high sample complexity and often produce physically…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Namai Chandra , Liu Mohan , Zhihao Gu , Lin Wang

Offline reinforcement learning agents face significant deployment challenges due to the synthetic-to-real distribution mismatch. While most prior research has focused on improving the fidelity of synthetic sampling and incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Chi Zhou , Wang Luo , Haoran Li , Congying Han , Tiande Guo , Zicheng Zhang

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods designed to handle adversarial input observations have received significant attention, motivated by RL's inherent vulnerabilities. While existing approaches have demonstrated reasonable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kosuke Nakanishi , Akihiro Kubo , Yuji Yasui , Shin Ishii

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that approximately solves the state-constrained optimal control problem for continuous-time uncertain nonlinear systems. We formulate the safe RL problem as the minimization…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-26 Soutrik Bandyopadhyay , Shubhendu Bhasin

Suppose an online platform wants to compare a treatment and control policy, e.g., two different matching algorithms in a ridesharing system, or two different inventory management algorithms in an online retail site. Standard randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-27 Peter Glynn , Ramesh Johari , Mohammad Rasouli

In this paper, we focus on the problem about direct way to design a stable controller for nonlinear system. A framework of learning controller with Lyapunov-based constraint is proposed, which is intended to transform designing and analyis…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Me Le , Chi Yanxun , Li Zhiwei , Xu Dongfu , Zhang Yulong

We aim to develop off-policy DRL algorithms that not only exceed state-of-the-art performance but are also simple and minimalistic. For standard continuous control benchmarks, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which employs entropy maximization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Che Wang , Yanqiu Wu , Quan Vuong , Keith Ross

This paper introduces a novel reinforcement learning (RL) strategy designed to facilitate rapid autonomy transfer by utilizing pre-trained critic value functions from multiple environments. Unlike traditional methods that require extensive…

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is an off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm, essentially based on entropy regularization. SAC trains a policy by maximizing the trade-off between expected return and entropy (randomness in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Stochastic optimization of the Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) is a crucial problem for machine learning. Although various algorithms have been extensively studied for AUPRC optimization, the generalization is only guaranteed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Peisong Wen , Qianqian Xu , Zhiyong Yang , Yuan He , Qingming Huang