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Consider a discrete-time Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem solved using policy gradient descent when the system matrices are unknown. The gradient is transmitted across a noisy channel over a finite time horizon using analog…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Ashwin Verma , Aritra Mitra , Lintao Ye , Vijay Gupta

In this paper, our goal is to study fundamental foundations of linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control problems for stochastic linear time-invariant systems via Lagrangian duality of semidefinite programming (SDP) problems. In particular,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-21 Donghwan Lee

Motivated by the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in control design, this paper analyses the intersection between results from gradient methods for the model-free linear quadratic regulator (LQR), and linear feedforward…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-27 Arthur Castello B. de Oliveira , Milad Siami , Eduardo D. Sontag

The linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem has reemerged as an important theoretical benchmark for reinforcement learning-based control of complex dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces. In contrast with nearly all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-04 Benjamin Gravell , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Tyler Summers

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Xin Chen , Yifan Hu , Minda Zhao

We consider the infinite dimensional linear programming (inf-LP) approach for solving stochastic control problems. The inf-LP corresponding to problems with uncountable state and input spaces is in general computationally intractable. By…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-16 Maryam Kamgarpour , Tyler Summers

This paper studies an infinite horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time linear systems and quadratic criteria, both with random parameters which are independent and identically distributed with respect to time. A classical approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-11 Kai Du , Qingxin Meng , Fu Zhang

This paper is concerned with a backward stochastic linear-quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problem with deterministic coefficients. The weighting matrices are allowed to be indefinite, and cross-product terms in the control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-13 Jingrui Sun , Zhen Wu , Jie Xiong

Model-free reinforcement learning attempts to find an optimal control action for an unknown dynamical system by directly searching over the parameter space of controllers. The convergence behavior and statistical properties of these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-17 Hesameddin Mohammadi , Armin Zare , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Mihailo R. Jovanović

Reinforcement learning is a powerful tool to learn the optimal policy of possibly multiple agents by interacting with the environment. As the number of agents grow to be very large, the system can be approximated by a mean-field problem.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-18 Weichen Wang , Jiequn Han , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

In this paper, we study the necessary and sufficient conditions for ensuring the well-posedness of the stochastic singular systems. Moreover, we investigate the stochastic singular linear-quadratic control problems, considering both finite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Mengzhen Li , Tianyang Nie , Zhen Wu

This paper is concerned with stochastic linear quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problems in an infinite horizon with constant coefficients. It is proved that the non-emptiness of the admissible control set for all initial state is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-10-18 Jingrui Sun , Jiongmin Yong

Policy optimization (PO) is a key ingredient for reinforcement learning (RL). For control design, certain constraints are usually enforced on the policies to optimize, accounting for either the stability, robustness, or safety concerns on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-16 Kaiqing Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

Direct policy search has achieved great empirical success in reinforcement learning. Many recent studies have revisited its theoretical foundation for continuous control, which reveals elegant nonconvex geometry in various benchmark…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-27 Yang Zheng , Chih-fan Pai , Yujie Tang

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-10 Alan Yang , Stephen Boyd

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Fabio Nobile , Matteo Raviola , Nathan Schaeffer

This paper applies a reinforcement learning (RL) method to solve infinite horizon continuous-time stochastic linear quadratic problems, where drift and diffusion terms in the dynamics may depend on both the state and control. Based on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-17 Na Li , Xun Li , Jing Peng , Zuo Quan Xu

This paper addresses the inverse optimal control problem of finding the state weighting function that leads to a quadratic value function when the cost on the input is fixed to be quadratic. The paper focuses on a class of infinite horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-21 Luis Rodrigues

We study an optimal control problem for the stochastic wave equation driven by affine multiplicative noise, formulated as a stochastic linear-quadratic (SLQ) problem. By applying a stochastic Pontryagin's maximum principle, we characterize…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Abhishek Chaudhary

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear policy class. Using the compatible function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Rui Yuan , Simon S. Du , Robert M. Gower , Alessandro Lazaric , Lin Xiao