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This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qianyi Chen , Ying Chen , Bo Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Model-based policy optimization is a well-established framework for designing reliable and high-performance controllers across a wide range of control applications. Recently, this approach has been extended to model predictive control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-15 Riccardo Zuliani , Efe C. Balta , John Lygeros

Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Junyu Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Zheng Yu , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo

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

We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenshuo Zhang , Minxuan Duan , Youran Ye , Hongyang R. Zhang

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

Optimization of hyper-parameters in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is a key task, because they determine how the agent will learn its policy by interacting with its environment, and thus what data is gathered. In this work, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-19 Juan Cruz Barsce , Jorge A. Palombarini , Ernesto Martínez

Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Thomas Spooner , Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh

Domain randomization (DR) is a successful technique for learning robust policies for robot systems, when the dynamics of the target robot system are unknown. The success of policies trained with domain randomization however, is highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Melissa Mozifian , Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera , David Meger , Gregory Dudek

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Matteo Papini , Damiano Binaghi , Giuseppe Canonaco , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

We present a unified framework for learning continuous control policies using backpropagation. It supports stochastic control by treating stochasticity in the Bellman equation as a deterministic function of exogenous noise. The product is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-02 Nicolas Heess , Greg Wayne , David Silver , Timothy Lillicrap , Yuval Tassa , Tom Erez

Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yanwei Jia , Du Ouyang , Yufei Zhang

In this paper, we implement three state-of-art continuous reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Policy Gradient (PG)in portfolio management. All of them are…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2018-11-20 Zhipeng Liang , Hao Chen , Junhao Zhu , Kangkang Jiang , Yanran Li

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle