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We propose ScalarFedLQR, a communication-efficient federated algorithm for model-free learning of a common policy in linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control of heterogeneous agents. The method builds on a decomposed projected gradient…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-08 Mohammadreza Rostami , Shahriar Talebi , Solmaz S. Kia

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-23 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Donald Goldfarb , Wei Liu

In this paper, we investigate a model-free optimal control design that minimizes an infinite horizon average expected quadratic cost of states and control actions subject to a probabilistic risk or chance constraint using input-output data.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-11 Arunava Naha , Subhrakanti Dey

The behaviour of a stochastic dynamical system may be largely influenced by those low-probability, yet extreme events. To address such occurrences, this paper proposes an infinite-horizon risk-constrained Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-30 Feiran Zhao , Keyou You , Tamer Basar

This paper presents a novel value iteration (VI) algorithm for finding the optimal control for a kind of infinite-horizon stochastic linear quadratic (SLQ) problem with unknown systems. First, an off-line algorithm is estabilished to obtain…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-15 Guangchen Wang , Heng Zhang

Domain randomization is a simple, effective, and flexible scheme for obtaining robust feedback policies aimed at reducing the sim-to-real gap due to model mismatch. While domain randomization methods have yielded impressive demonstrations…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Alex Nguyen-Le , Nikolai Matni

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Huaiyi Mu , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Zhongkui Li

We study the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation and present efficient and practical algorithms that come with strong optimality guarantees. We begin by proving lower bounds that establish baselines on both the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-16 Tianjiao Li , Guanghui Lan , Ashwin Pananjady

To further understand the underlying mechanism of various reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms and also to better use the optimization theory to make further progress in RL, many researchers begin to revisit the linear-quadratic regulator…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-18 Man Li , Jiahu Qin , Wei Xing Zheng , Yaonan Wang , Yu Kang

In this paper, we investigate a data-driven framework to solve Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problems when the dynamics is unknown, with the additional challenge of providing stability certificates for the overall learning and control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-13 Lorenzo Sforni , Guido Carnevale , Ivano Notarnicola , Giuseppe Notarstefano

We propose two policy gradient algorithms for solving the problem of control in an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) context. Both algorithms incorporate a smoothed functional (SF) based gradient estimation scheme. The first algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

With the outstanding performance of policy gradient (PG) method in the reinforcement learning field, the convergence theory of it has aroused more and more interest recently. Meanwhile, the significant importance and abundant theoretical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-19 Xinpei Zhang , Guangyan Jia

Model-free reinforcement learning attempts to find an optimal control action for an unknown dynamical system by directly searching over the parameter space of controllers. The convergence behavior and statistical properties of these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-17 Hesameddin Mohammadi , Armin Zare , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Mihailo R. Jovanović

We study the policy gradient method (PGM) for the linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) dynamic output-feedback control problem using an input-output-history (IOH) representation of the closed-loop system. First, we show that any dynamic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-23 Tomonori Sadamoto , Takashi Tanaka

This paper proposes and analyzes two new policy learning methods: regularized policy gradient (RPG) and iterative policy optimization (IPO), for a class of discounted linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems over an infinite time horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-08 Xin Guo , Xinyu Li , Renyuan Xu

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

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

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

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

We propose a single time-scale actor-critic algorithm to solve the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. A least squares temporal difference (LSTD) method is applied to the critic and a natural policy gradient method is used for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-07 Mo Zhou , Jianfeng Lu