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Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which aligns a diffusion model with input prompt, has become a crucial step in building reliable generative AI models. Most works in this area use a discrete-time formulation, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Hanyang Zhao , Haoxian Chen , Ji Zhang , David D. Yao , Wenpin Tang

Motivated by the success of reinforcement learning (RL) for discrete-time tasks such as AlphaGo and Atari games, there has been a recent surge of interest in using RL for continuous-time control of physical systems (cf. many challenging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-03 Motoya Ohnishi , Masahiro Yukawa , Mikael Johansson , Masashi Sugiyama

In this paper, we consider discrete-time infinite horizon problems of optimal control to a terminal set of states. These are the problems that are often taken as the starting point for adaptive dynamic programming. Under very general…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-10-05 Dimitri P. Bertsekas

In this paper, we study the optimal dividend problem under the continuous time diffusion model with the bounded dividend rate from the Reinforcement Learning (RL) perspective. Unlike the standard literature, our main focus will be on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-30 Lihua Bai , Thejani Gamage , Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

This works handles the inverse reinforcement learning problem in high-dimensional state spaces, which relies on an efficient solution of model-based high-dimensional reinforcement learning problems. To solve the computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-28 Kun Li , Joel W. Burdick

We consider dynamic programming problems with finite, discrete-time horizons and prohibitively high-dimensional, discrete state-spaces for direct computation of the value function from the Bellman equation. For the case that the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-25 Denis Lebedev , Paul Goulart , Kostas Margellos

We consider challenging dynamic programming models where the associated Bellman equation, and the value and policy iteration algorithms commonly exhibit complex and even pathological behavior. Our analysis is based on the new notion of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-13 Dimitri P. Bertsekas

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms still suffer from high sample complexity despite outstanding recent successes. The need for intensive interactions with the environment is especially observed in many widely popular policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Samuele Tosatto , Joao Carvalho , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

We present a novel algorithm that efficiently computes near-optimal deterministic policies for constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) problems. Our approach combines three key ideas: (1) value-demand augmentation, (2) action-space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Jeremy McMahan

We consider impulse control problems in finite horizon for diffusions with decision lag and execution delay. The new feature is that our general framework deals with the important case when several consecutive orders may be decided before…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Benjamin Bruder , Huyen Pham

We consider the value function of a stochastic optimal control of degenerate diffusion processes in a domain $D$. We study the smoothness of the value function, under the assumption of the non-degeneracy of the diffusion term along the…

Probability · Mathematics 2013-02-28 Wei Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

This paper is devoted to the analysis of a finite horizon discrete-time stochastic optimal control problem, in presence of constraints. We study the regularity of the value function which comes from the dynamic programming algorithm. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2007-05-23 M. Papi , S. Sbaraglia

This paper studies systematic exploration for reinforcement learning with rich observations and function approximation. We introduce a new model called contextual decision processes, that unifies and generalizes most prior settings. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-02 Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

This article is concerned with the convergence of the state estimate obtained from the discrete time Kalman filter to the continuous time estimate as the temporal discretization is refined. We derive convergence rate estimates for different…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-12-10 Atte Aalto

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Kaicheng Jin , Yang Peng , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

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

One of the most fundamental questions in quantitative finance is the existence of continuous-time diffusion models that fit market prices of a given set of options. Traditionally, one employs a mix of intuition, theoretical and empirical…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-10-09 Nelson Vadori