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Flow-based generative models have shown remarkable success in text-to-image generation, yet fine-tuning them with intermediate feedback remains challenging, especially for continuous-time flow matching models. Most existing approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jiajun Fan , Chaoran Cheng , Shuaike Shen , Xiangxin Zhou , Ge Liu

Synchronizing decisions across multiple agents in realistic settings is problematic since it requires agents to wait for other agents to terminate and communicate about termination reliably. Ideally, agents should learn and execute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Yuchen Xiao , Weihao Tan , Christopher Amato

Several recent works have focused on carrying out non-asymptotic convergence analyses for AC algorithms. Recently, a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm has been presented for the discounted cost setting in the look-up table case where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

In this paper, we study the stochastic optimal control problem for control system with time-varying delay. The corresponding stochastic differential equation is a kind of stochastic differential delay equation. We prove the existence and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-17 Yuhang Li , Yuecai Han

Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. The main players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients of neural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Recep Yusuf Bekci , Mehmet Gümüş

Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Ziheng Wang , Justin Sirignano

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Ruofan Wu , Junmin Zhong , Jennie Si

We consider continuous-time stochastic optimal control problems featuring Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) in the objective. The major difficulty in these problems arises from time-inconsistency, which prevents us from directly using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-27 Christopher W. Miller , Insoon Yang

In this paper, we propose a class of discrete-time approximation schemes for stochastic optimal control problems under the $G$-expectation framework. The proposed schemes are constructed recursively based on piecewise constant policy. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-05 Lianzi Jiang

The actor-critic (AC) algorithm is a popular method to find an optimal policy in reinforcement learning. In the infinite horizon scenario, the finite-sample convergence rate for the AC and natural actor-critic (NAC) algorithms has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang

We present a dynamic programming-based solution to a stochastic optimal control problem up to a hitting time for a discrete-time Markov control process. Firstly, we determine an optimal control policy to steer the process toward a compact…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2009-09-28 Debasish Chatterjee , Eugenio Cinquemani , Giorgos Chaloulos , John Lygeros

Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Actor-critic methods can achieve incredible performance on difficult reinforcement learning problems, but they are also prone to instability. This is partly due to the interaction between the actor and critic during learning, e.g., an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Simone Parisi , Voot Tangkaratt , Jan Peters , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

This paper presents a method to approximately solve stochastic optimal control problems in which the cost function and the system dynamics are polynomial. For stochastic systems with polynomial dynamics, the moments of the state can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-02-24 Andrew Lamperski , Khem Raj Ghusinga , Abhyudai Singh

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are known for their efficacy and high performance in solving reinforcement learning problems, but they also suffer from low sampling efficiency. An AC based policy optimization process is iterative and needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman , Mohsen Zamani

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

We introduce a class of variational actor-critic algorithms based on a variational formulation over both the value function and the policy. The objective function of the variational formulation consists of two parts: one for maximizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuhua Zhu , Lexing Ying

This paper studies stochastic control problems with the action space taken to be probability measures, with the objective penalised by the relative entropy. We identify suitable metric space on which we construct a gradient flow for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-26 David Šiška , Łukasz Szpruch