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Accurate risk quantification and reachability analysis are crucial for safe control and learning, but sampling from rare events, risky states, or long-term trajectories can be prohibitively costly. Motivated by this, we study how to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-31 Hikaru Hoshino , Yorie Nakahira

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) studies problems where an intelligent agent has to not only maximize reward but also avoid exploring unsafe areas. In this study, we propose CUP, a novel policy optimization method based on Constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Long Yang , Jiaming Ji , Juntao Dai , Linrui Zhang , Binbin Zhou , Pengfei Li , Yaodong Yang , Gang Pan

When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guopeng Li , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Julian F. P. Kooij

Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 David M. Bossens , Atsushi Nitanda

Reinforcement learning is a model-free optimal control method that optimizes a control policy through direct interaction with the environment. For reaching tasks that end in regulation, popular discrete-action methods are not well suited…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Wouter Caarls

We propose a novel continuous-time algorithm for inequality-constrained convex optimization inspired by proportional-integral control. Unlike the popular primal-dual gradient dynamics, our method includes a proportional term to control the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-12 V. Cerone , S. M. Fosson , S. Pirrera , D. Regruto

We consider solutions to the linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) regulator problem via policy gradient (PG) methods. Although PG methods have demonstrated strong theoretical guarantees in solving the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-15 Kasra Fallah , Leonardo F. Toso , James Anderson

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) agents accomplish given tasks while adhering to specific constraints. Employing constraints expressed via easily-understandable human language offers considerable potential for real-world applications due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xingzhou Lou , Junge Zhang , Ziyan Wang , Kaiqi Huang , Yali Du

Entropy regularized Markov decision processes have been widely used in reinforcement learning. This paper is concerned with the primal-dual formulation of the entropy regularized problems. Standard first-order methods suffer from slow…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-13 Haoya Li , Hsiang-fu Yu , Lexing Ying , Inderjit Dhillon

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

Policy gradient methods, where one searches for the policy of interest by maximizing the value functions using first-order information, become increasingly popular for sequential decision making in reinforcement learning, games, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-10 Shicong Cen , Yuejie Chi

We propose an adversarial deep reinforcement learning (ADRL) algorithm for high-dimensional stochastic control problems. Inspired by the information relaxation duality, ADRL reformulates the control problem as a min-max optimization between…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-03 Nan Chen , Mengzhou Liu , Xiaoyan Wang , Nanyi Zhang

Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Florian Wolf , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Murad Dawood , Usama Ahmed Siddiquie , Shahram Khorshidi , Maren Bennewitz

Hard constraints in reinforcement learning (RL) often degrade policy performance. Lagrangian methods offer a way to blend objectives with constraints, but require intricate reward engineering and parameter tuning. In this work, we extend…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 William Sharpless , Dylan Hirsch , Sander Tonkens , Nikhil Shinde , Sylvia Herbert

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-27 Christoph Reisinger , Wolfgang Stockinger , Yufei Zhang

Optimal execution is a sequential decision-making problem for cost-saving in algorithmic trading. Studies have found that reinforcement learning (RL) can help decide the order-splitting sizes. However, a problem remains unsolved: how to…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2022-07-25 Feiyang Pan , Tongzhe Zhang , Ling Luo , Jia He , Shuoling Liu

In this chapter we derive computational complexity certifications of first order inexact dual methods for solving general smooth constrained convex problems which can arise in real-time applications, such as model predictive control. When…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-06-18 Ion Necoara , Andrei Patrascu , Angelia Nedić

In performative Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent faces a policy-dependent environment: the reward and transition functions depend on the agent's policy. Prior work on performative RL has studied the convergence of repeated retraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Vasilis Pollatos , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic