English
Related papers

Related papers: Convergence of Policy Gradient for Stochastic Line…

200 papers

A linear-quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problem is considered for mean-field stochastic differential equations with constant coefficients in an infinite horizon. The stabilizability of the control system is studied followed by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-08-28 Jianhui Huang , Xun Li , Jiongmin Yong

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

Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Bin Hu , Kaiqing Zhang , Na Li , Mehran Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Tamer Başar

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

This paper employs a policy iteration reinforcement learning (RL) method to study continuous-time linear-quadratic mean-field control problems in infinite horizon. The drift and diffusion terms in the dynamics involve the states, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Na Li , Xun Li , Zuo Quan Xu

We consider the task of learning to control a linear dynamical system under fixed quadratic costs, known as the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem. While model-free approaches are often favorable in practice, thus far only model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Asaf Cassel , Tomer Koren

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

In this paper we investigate the convergence of the Policy Iteration Algorithm (PIA) for a class of general continuous-time entropy-regularized stochastic control problems. In particular, instead of employing sophisticated PDE estimates for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-24 Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang , Jianfeng Zhang

In the last decades, control problems with infinite horizons and discount factors have become increasingly central not only for economics but also for applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The strong links between…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-25 Vincenzo Basco

We investigate the problem of learning linear quadratic regulators (LQR) in a multi-task, heterogeneous, and model-free setting. We characterize the stability and personalization guarantees of a policy gradient-based (PG) model-agnostic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Leonardo F. Toso , Donglin Zhan , James Anderson , Han Wang

Consider a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem being solved in a model-free manner using the policy gradient approach. If the gradient of the quadratic cost is being transmitted across a rate-limited channel, both the convergence and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-20 Lintao Ye , Aritra Mitra , Vijay Gupta

In safety-critical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) needs to consider safety constraints. However, theoretical understandings of constrained RL for continuous control are largely absent. As a case study, this paper presents a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-07 Feiran Zhao , Keyou You

Solutions of optimization problems, including policy optimization in reinforcement learning, typically rely upon some variant of gradient descent. There has been much recent work in the machine learning, control, and optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Eduardo D. Sontag

The convergence of policy gradient algorithms hinges on the optimization landscape of the underlying optimal control problem. Theoretical insights into these algorithms can often be acquired from analyzing those of linear quadratic control.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-02 Jingliang Duan , Wenhan Cao , Yang Zheng , Lin Zhao

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a general class of policy mirror descent methods, all with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Lin Xiao

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

In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-24 Bowen Song , Simon Weissmann , Mathias Staudigl , Andrea Iannelli

There has been substantial recent progress on the theoretical understanding of model-free approaches to Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problems. Much attention has been devoted to the special case when the goal is to drive the state close…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-13 Zhaolin Ren , Aoxiao Zhong , Na Li

Domain randomization (DR) enables sim-to-real transfer by training controllers on a distribution of simulated environments, with the goal of achieving robust performance in the real world. Although DR is widely used in practice and is often…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-01 Tesshu Fujinami , Bruce D. Lee , Nikolai Matni , George J. Pappas

This paper is concerned with a stochastic linear-quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem on infinite time horizon, with regime switching, random coefficients, and cone control constraint. To tackle the problem, two new extended stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-06 Ying Hu , Xiaomin Shi , Zuo Quan Xu