English
Related papers

Related papers: Asynchronous Parallel Policy Gradient Methods for …

200 papers

We present a midpoint policy iteration algorithm to solve linear quadratic optimal control problems in both model-based and model-free settings. The algorithm is a variation of Newton's method, and we show that in the model-based setting it…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-16 Benjamin Gravell , Iman Shames , Tyler Summers

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

Motivated by large-scale optimization problems arising in the context of machine learning, there have been several advances in the study of asynchronous parallel and distributed optimization methods during the past decade. Asynchronous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Mahmoud Assran , Arda Aytekin , Hamid Feyzmahdavian , Mikael Johansson , Michael Rabbat

A method is presented for parallelizing the computation of solutions to discrete-time, linear-quadratic, finite-horizon optimal control problems, which we will refer to as LQR problems. This class of problem arises frequently in robotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-18 Forrest Laine , Claire Tomlin

We study the global linear convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods for finite-horizon continuous-time exploratory linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems. The setting includes stochastic LQC problems with indefinite costs and allows…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-05 Michael Giegrich , Christoph Reisinger , Yufei Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments, particularly when system parameters are unknown. This paper investigates RL-based control for entropy-regularized…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-02 Gabriel Diaz , Lucky Li , Wenhao Zhang

In this work, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for visual policy learning that leverages differentiable simulation and first-order analytical policy gradients. Our approach decouple the rendering process from the computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Haoxiang You , Yilang Liu , Ian Abraham

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

We present a new algorithm for solving linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) problems with linear equality constraints, also known as constrained LQR (CLQR) problems. Our method's sequential runtime is linear in the number of stages and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-06 João Sousa-Pinto , Dominique Orban

We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Rui Zhu , Di Niu , Zongpeng Li

Asynchronous methods for solving systems of linear equations have been researched since Chazan and Miranker's pioneering 1969 paper on chaotic relaxation. The underlying idea of asynchronous methods is to avoid processor idle time by…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2015-07-16 Haim Avron , Alex Druinsky , Anshul Gupta

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have shown promise in solving sequential decision problems (SDPs) by simplifying them to static optimization problems and searching for the optimal policy parameters in a zeroth-order way. While these methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yuheng Lei , Yao Lyu , Guojian Zhan , Tao Zhang , Jiangtao Li , Jianyu Chen , Shengbo Eben Li , Sifa Zheng

We investigate the problem of learning an $\epsilon$-approximate solution for the discrete-time Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem via a Stochastic Variance-Reduced Policy Gradient (SVRPG) approach. Whilst policy gradient methods have…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-20 Leonardo F. Toso , Han Wang , James Anderson

Asynchronous parallel optimization algorithms for solving large-scale machine learning problems have drawn significant attention from academia to industry recently. This paper proposes a novel algorithm, decoupled asynchronous proximal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Yitan Li , Linli Xu , Xiaowei Zhong , Qing Ling

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

In this paper, we propose a parallel shooting algorithm for solving nonlinear model predictive control problems using sequential quadratic programming. This algorithm is built on a two-phase approach where we first test and assess…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-21 P. C. N. Verheijen , M. Haghi , M. Lazar , D. Goswami

The need for scalable numerical solutions has motivated the development of asynchronous parallel algorithms, where a set of nodes run in parallel with little or no synchronization, thus computing with delayed information. This paper studies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-18 Robert Hannah , Wotao Yin

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…

This paper develops a policy learning method for tuning a pre-trained policy to adapt to additional tasks without altering the original task. A method named Adaptive Policy Gradient (APG) is proposed in this paper, which combines Bellman's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Wenjian Hao , Zehui Lu , Zihao Liang , Tianyu Zhou , Shaoshuai Mou

Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Jie Xu , Viktor Makoviychuk , Yashraj Narang , Fabio Ramos , Wojciech Matusik , Animesh Garg , Miles Macklin