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In this paper, we consider nonlinear optimization problems with a stochastic objective function and deterministic equality constraints. We propose an inexact two-stepsize stochastic sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm and…
Linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) is a landmark problem in the field of optimal control, which is the concern of this paper. Generally, LQR is classified into state-feedback LQR (SLQR) and output-feedback LQR (OLQR) based on whether the full…
We develop a Sequential Quadratic Optimization (SQP) algorithm for minimizing a stochastic objective function subject to deterministic equality constraints. The method utilizes two different stepsizes, one which exclusively scales the…
We study the discrete-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control model using reinforcement learning (RL). Using entropy to measure the cost of exploration, we prove that the optimal feedback policy for the problem must be Gaussian type. Then, we…
This article presents a unified approach to quadratic optimal control for both linear and nonlinear discrete-time systems, with a focus on trajectory tracking. The control strategy is based on minimizing a quadratic cost function that…
Policy evaluation is a crucial step in many reinforcement-learning procedures, which estimates a value function that predicts states' long-term value under a given policy. In this paper, we focus on policy evaluation with linear function…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
We propose a method for designing policies for convex stochastic control problems characterized by random linear dynamics and convex stage cost. We consider policies that employ quadratic approximate value functions as a substitute for the…
Learning policies in an asynchronous parallel way is essential to the numerous successes of RL for solving large-scale problems. However, their convergence performance is still not rigorously evaluated. To this end, we adopt the…
Variance reduction techniques like SVRG provide simple and fast algorithms for optimizing a convex finite-sum objective. For nonconvex objectives, these techniques can also find a first-order stationary point (with small gradient). However,…
We consider the problem of stochastic optimal control, where the state-feedback control policies take the form of a probability distribution and where a penalty on the entropy is added. By viewing the cost function as a Kullback- Leibler…
In this paper we apply the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) method, which is a popular variance reduction method in optimization for accelerating the stochastic gradient method, to solve large scale linear ill-posed systems in…
We study in this paper a class of constrained linear-quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem formulations for the scalar-state stochastic system with multiplicative noise, which has various applications, especially in the financial risk…
We study projection-free methods for functional constrained optimization with convex or smooth nonconvex objectives. Such problems arise in applications such as portfolio optimization and radiation therapy planning, where risk-aware…
We study model-free learning methods for the output-feedback Linear Quadratic (LQ) control problem in finite-horizon subject to subspace constraints on the control policy. Subspace constraints naturally arise in the field of distributed…
We consider solving nonlinear optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints, assuming that only zero-order information is available for both the objective and constraints, and that the objective is…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods for finding optimal policies in linear quadratic (LQ) mean field control (MFC) problems over an infinite horizon in continuous time, with common noise and entropy regularization. We study…
This paper studies the stochastic optimal control problem for systems with unknown dynamics. A novel decoupled data based control (D2C) approach is proposed, which solves the problem in a decoupled "open loop-closed loop" fashion that is…
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,…