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We consider the classic stochastic linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem under an infinite horizon average stage cost. By leveraging recent policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning, we obtain a first-order method that finds a…
Policy gradient algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning and belong to the class of approximate dynamic programming methods. This paper studies two key policy gradient algorithms, the Natural Policy Gradient and the Gauss-Newton…
In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…
We provide the first known algorithm that provably achieves $\varepsilon$-optimality within $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\varepsilon)$ function evaluations for the discounted discrete-time LQR problem with unknown parameters, without relying…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…
We consider the task of learning to control a linear dynamical system under fixed quadratic costs, known as the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem. While model-free approaches are often favorable in practice, thus far only model-based…
We consider the static output feedback control for Linear Quadratic Regulator problems with structured constraints under the assumption that system parameters are unknown. To solve the problem in the model free setting, we propose the…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are the backbone of many reinforcement learning algorithms due to their good performance in policy optimization problems. As a gradient-based approach, PG methods typically rely on knowledge of the system…
Direct data-driven design methods for the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) mainly use offline or episodic data batches, and their online adaptation has been acknowledged as an open problem. In this paper, we propose a direct adaptive method…
Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…
We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…
Improving the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning has been a long-standing research problem. In this work, we aim to reduce the sample complexity of existing policy gradient methods. We propose a novel policy gradient algorithm…
A gradient-based method is proposed for solving the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem for linear systems with nonlinear dependence on time-invariant probabilistic parametric uncertainties. The approach explicitly accounts for model…
We revisit in this paper the discrete-time linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem from the perspective of receding-horizon policy gradient (RHPG), a newly developed model-free learning framework for control applications. We provide a…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
We consider the continuous-time Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (LQR) problem in terms of optimizing a real-valued matrix function over the set of feedback gains. The results developed are in parallel to those in Bu et al. [1] for discrete-time…
Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…
In safety-critical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) needs to consider safety constraints. However, theoretical understandings of constrained RL for continuous control are largely absent. As a case study, this paper presents a…
The convergence of policy gradient algorithms hinges on the optimization landscape of the underlying optimal control problem. Theoretical insights into these algorithms can often be acquired from analyzing those of linear quadratic control.…