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Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Kaiqing Zhang , Alec Koppel , Hao Zhu , Tamer Başar

While the techniques in optimal control theory are often model-based, the policy optimization (PO) approach directly optimizes the performance metric of interest. Even though it has been an essential approach for reinforcement learning…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-23 Feiran Zhao , Keyou You , Tamer Başar

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

This paper is concerned with a stochastic linear quadratic (LQ, for short) control problem with a recursive cost functional in an infinite horizon. A main difficult is well-posedness of the BSDE in $L^1$ and in infinite horizon. A notion of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-07 Lin Li , Jiongmin Yong

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Yinbin Han , Meisam Razaviyayn , Renyuan Xu

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-11 Bowen Song , Sebastien Gros , Andrea Iannelli

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

We analyze independent policy-gradient (PG) learning in $N$-player linear-quadratic (LQ) stochastic differential games. Each player employs a distributed policy that depends only on its own state and updates the policy independently using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-19 Philipp Plank , Yufei Zhang

Flow $Q$-learning has recently been introduced to integrate learning from expert demonstrations into an actor-critic structure. Central to this innovation is the ``the one-step policy'' network, which is optimized through a $Q$-function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-17 Farnaz Adib Yaghmaie , Arunava Naha

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-30 Leilei Cui , Richard D. Braatz

We consider policy gradient methods for stochastic optimal control problem in continuous time. In particular, we analyze the gradient flow for the control, viewed as a continuous time limit of the policy gradient method. We prove the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-15 Mo Zhou , Jianfeng Lu

This paper studies a continuous-time stochastic linear-quadratic (SLQ) optimal control problem on infinite-horizon. A data-driven policy iteration algorithm is proposed to solve the SLQ problem. Without knowing three system coefficient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-30 Heng Zhang , Na Li

Owing to the growth of interest in Reinforcement Learning in the last few years, gradient based policy control methods have been gaining popularity for Control problems as well. And rightly so, since gradient policy methods have the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-01 Santanu Rathod , Manoj Bhadu , Abir De

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-07-14 Luca Furieri , Yang Zheng , Maryam Kamgarpour

This paper investigates a stochastic linear-quadratic (SLQ, for short) control problem regulated by a time-invariant Markov chain in infinite horizon. Under the $L^2$-stability framework, we study a class of linear backward stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Fan Wu , Xun Li , Xin Zhang

We study the convergence of model-based policy gradient for the deterministic, scalar, discounted linear-quadratic regulator when the controller is an overparameterized one-hidden-layer ReLU network without biases. Although the optimal LQR…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-27 Jhojan A. Rodriguez-Gil , César A. Uribe

Stability is one of the most fundamental requirements for systems synthesis. In this paper, we address the stabilization problem for unknown linear systems via policy gradient (PG) methods. We leverage a key feature of PG for Linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-20 Feiran Zhao , Xingyun Fu , Keyou You

This paper studies a class of continuous-time scalar-state stochastic Linear-Quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem with the linear control constraints. Applying the state separation theorem induced from its special structure, we develop…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2018-06-12 Weiping Wu , Jianjun Gao , Junguo Lu , Xun Li

While the optimization landscape of policy gradient methods has been recently investigated for partially observed linear systems in terms of both static output feedback and dynamical controllers, they only provide convergence guarantees to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-25 Feiran Zhao , Xingyun Fu , Keyou You