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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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Amirreza Valaei , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sadegh Soudjani

The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar

The problem of constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) holds significant importance as it provides a framework for addressing critical safety satisfaction concerns in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Chengbin Xuan , Feng Zhang , Faliang Yin , Hak-Keung Lam

In optimal control problem, policy iteration (PI) is a powerful reinforcement learning (RL) tool used for designing optimal controller for the linear systems. However, the need for an initial stabilizing control policy significantly limits…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-13 Zhen Pang , Shengda Tang , Jun Cheng , Shuping He

Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Hyunin Lee , Javad Lavaei

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

Recent developments in Reinforcement learning have significantly enhanced sequential decision-making in uncertain environments. Despite their strong performance guarantees, most existing work has focused primarily on improving the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-13 Bo Pan , Jianya Lu , Yafei Wang , Hao Li , Bei Jiang , Linglong Kong

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-07 Feiran Zhao , Florian Dörfler , Alessandro Chiuso , Keyou You

Policy gradient methods usually rely on entropy regularization to prevent premature convergence. However, maximizing entropy indiscriminately pushes the policy towards a uniform distribution, often overriding the reward signal if not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Luca Serfilippi , Giorgio Franceschelli , Antonio Corradi , Mirco Musolesi

In RL, given a prompt, we sample a group of completions from a model and score them. Two questions follow: which completions should gain probability mass, and how should the parameters move to realize that change? Standard policy-gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Jean Kaddour

Data-enabled policy optimization (DeePO) is a newly proposed method to attack the open problem of direct adaptive LQR. In this work, we extend the DeePO framework to the linear quadratic tracking (LQT) with offline data. By introducing a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-10 Shubo Kang , Feiran Zhao , Keyou You

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

It is known that reinforcement learning (RL) is data-hungry. To improve sample-efficiency of RL, it has been proposed that the learning algorithm utilize data from 'approximately similar' processes. However, since the process models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vinay Kanakeri , Shivam Bajaj , Ashwin Verma , Vijay Gupta , Aritra Mitra

Reinforcement learning (RL) and trajectory optimization (TO) present strong complementary advantages. On one hand, RL approaches are able to learn global control policies directly from data, but generally require large sample sizes to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Quentin Le Lidec , Wilson Jallet , Ivan Laptev , Cordelia Schmid , Justin Carpentier

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

Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) often faces significant issues such as constraint violations and instability, necessitating the use of constrained policy optimization, which seeks optimal policies while ensuring adherence to specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Ning Yang , Pengyu Wang , Guoqing Liu , Haifeng Zhang , Pin Lv , Jun Wang

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Linear quadratic regulator (LQR) is one of the most popular frameworks to tackle continuous Markov decision process tasks. With its fundamental theory and tractable optimal policy, LQR has been revisited and analyzed in recent years, in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Youngsuk Park , Ryan A. Rossi , Zheng Wen , Gang Wu , Handong Zhao

Safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) aims to respect safety requirements while optimizing long-term performance. In many practical applications, however, the problem involves an infinite number of constraints, known as semi-infinite safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Jiaming Zhang , Yujie Yang , Haoning Wang , Liping Zhang , Shengbo Eben Li

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-27 Christoph Reisinger , Wolfgang Stockinger , Yufei Zhang