Related papers: Policy Gradient Methods for the Cost-Constrained L…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach for solving optimal control problems without knowing the exact information of the system model. However, the classical Q-learning method, a model-free RL algorithm, has its limitations,…
Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) is receiving more and more attentions due to its successful demonstrations outperforming human performance in certain challenging tasks. In our recent paper `primal-dual Q-learning framework for LQR…
A common formulation of constrained reinforcement learning involves multiple rewards that must individually accumulate to given thresholds. In this class of problems, we show a simple example in which the desired optimal policy cannot be…
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…
The growing safety concerns surrounding large language models raise an urgent need to align them with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their helpfulness and safety. A promising approach is to enforce safety constraints…
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…
The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes with an unknown cost function and address the problem of learning a policy from a finite set of expert demonstrations. We assume that the learner is not allowed to interact with the expert…
We study the problem of computing an optimal large language model (LLM) policy for the constrained alignment problem, where the goal is to maximize a primary reward objective while satisfying constraints on secondary utilities. Despite the…
In this work, we revisit a classical incremental implementation of the primal-descent dual-ascent gradient method used for the solution of equality constrained optimization problems. We provide a short proof that establishes the linear…
We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…
We analyze the performance of policy gradient in multitask linear quadratic regulation (LQR), where the system and cost parameters differ across tasks. The main goal of multitask LQR is to find a controller with satisfactory performance on…
A stochastic linear quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem with a pointwise linear equality constraint on the terminal state is considered. A strong Lagrangian duality theorem is proved under a uniform convexity condition on the cost…
Primal-dual methods have a natural application in Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL), posed as a constrained policy optimization problem. In practice however, applying primal-dual methods to SRL is challenging, due to the inter-dependency of…
We study the discrete-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control model using reinforcement learning (RL). Using entropy to measure the cost of exploration, we prove that the optimal feedback policy for the problem must be Gaussian type. Then, we…
Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…
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…
Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are vulnerable to adversarial disturbances, which can deteriorate task performance or compromise safety specifications. Existing methods either address safety requirements under the assumption of no…
Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (Safe RLHF) has recently achieved empirical success in developing helpful and harmless large language models by decoupling human preferences regarding helpfulness and harmlessness. Existing…