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We explore the use of policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning for quantum control via energy landscape shaping of XX-Heisenberg spin chains in a model agnostic fashion. Their performance is compared to finding controllers using…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-07-19 I. Khalid , C. A. Weidner , E. A. Jonckheere , S. G. Schirmer , F. C. Langbein

This paper studies linear quadratic Gaussian robust mean field social control problems in the presence of multiplicative noise. We aim to compute asymptotic decentralized strategies without requiring full prior knowledge of agents'…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Zhenhui Xu , Jiayu Chen , Bing-Chang Wang , Yuhu Wu , Tielong Shen

While the optimization landscape of policy gradient methods has been recently investigated for partially observed linear systems in terms of both static output feedback and dynamical controllers, they only provide convergence guarantees to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-25 Feiran Zhao , Xingyun Fu , Keyou You

Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Hyunin Lee , Javad Lavaei

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex policies to optimize agent operation over time. RL algorithms have shown promising results in solving complicated problems in recent years. However, their application on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Hamed Khorasgani , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta , Susumu Serita

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), despite its popularity and empirical success, suffers from the curse of dimensionality. This paper builds the mathematical framework to approximate cooperative MARL by a mean-field control (MFC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-04 Haotian Gu , Xin Guo , Xiaoli Wei , Renyuan Xu

Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Matteo Papini , 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

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-01-04 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution returns a safe policy regardless of when it is terminated. Drawing inspiration from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-18 Pol Mestres , Arnau Marzabal , Jorge Cortés

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Junyu Zhang , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng

This paper studies a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based actor critic (AC) reinforcement learning (RL) technique to control a linear discrete-time system with a quadratic control cost while ensuring a constraint on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-22 Arunava Naha , Subhrakanti Dey

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Constrained optimization is popularly seen in reinforcement learning for addressing complex control tasks. From the perspective of dynamic system, iteratively solving a constrained optimization problem can be framed as the temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Tianqi Zhang , Puzhen Yuan , Guojian Zhan , Ziyu Lin , Yao Lyu , Zhenzhi Qin , Jingliang Duan , Liping Zhang , Shengbo Eben Li

Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Amirreza Valaei , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sadegh Soudjani