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Safe reinforcement learning (RL) typically asks $\textit{what}$ an agent should do. We ask $\textit{when}$ it needs to act, and show that a single policy can jointly learn control inputs and communication-efficient timing decisions under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Adam Haroon , Erick J. Rodríguez-Seda , Cody Fleming , Tristan Schuler

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Training large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents often begins with imitation learning, but it only teaches agents what to do without understanding why: agents never contrast successful actions against suboptimal alternatives and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Weize Liu , Minghui Liu , Sy-Tuyen Ho , Souradip Chakraborty , Xiyao Wang , Furong Huang

Despite advances in learning-based methods, finding valid Lyapunov functions for nonlinear dynamical systems remains challenging. Current neural network approaches face two main issues: challenges in scalable verification and limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Haohan Zou , Jie Feng , Hao Zhao , Yuanyuan Shi

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

The application of reinforcement learning to safety-critical systems is limited by the lack of formal methods for verifying the robustness and safety of learned policies. This paper introduces a novel framework that addresses this gap by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Ahmed Nasir , Abdelhafid Zenati

An agent employing reinforcement learning takes inputs (state variables) from an environment and performs actions that affect the environment in order to achieve some objective. Rewards (positive or negative) guide the agent toward improved…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-29 James E. Smith

High-precision control tasks present substantial challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, frequently resulting in suboptimal performance attributed to network approximation inaccuracies and inadequate sample quality.These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Donghe Chen , Yubin Peng , Tengjie Zheng , Han Wang , Chaoran Qu , Lin Cheng

We present an online model-based reinforcement learning algorithm suitable for controlling complex robotic systems directly in the real world. Unlike prevailing sim-to-real pipelines that rely on extensive offline simulation and model-free…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Fang Nan , Hao Ma , Qinghua Guan , Josie Hughes , Michael Muehlebach , Marco Hutter

Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Quoc-Vinh Lai-Dang , Dongsoo Har

In partially observable reinforcement learning, offline training gives access to latent information which is not available during online training and/or execution, such as the system state. Asymmetric actor-critic methods exploit such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Andrea Baisero , Christopher Amato

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, growing demand variability, and evolving grid control strategies, accurate and efficient load modeling has become a critical yet challenging task. Traditional methods, such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-11 Ding Lin , Han Guo , Jianhui Wang , Meng Yue , Tianqiao Zhao

This paper introduces the offline meta-reinforcement learning (offline meta-RL) problem setting and proposes an algorithm that performs well in this setting. Offline meta-RL is analogous to the widely successful supervised learning strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-22 Eric Mitchell , Rafael Rafailov , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a proven method for optimizing a procedure for which success has been defined, but the specific actions needed to achieve it have not. We apply the so-called "black box" method of RL to what has been…

Computational Physics · Physics 2022-09-12 Kyle Mills , Pooya Ronagh , Isaac Tamblyn

We study online control for continuous-time linear systems with finite sampling rates, where the objective is to design an online procedure that learns under non-stochastic noise and performs comparably to a fixed optimal linear controller.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Jingwei Li , Jing Dong , Can Chang , Baoxiang Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

A survey of existing methods for stopping active learning (AL) reveals the needs for methods that are: more widely applicable; more aggressive in saving annotations; and more stable across changing datasets. A new method for stopping AL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-09-19 Michael Bloodgood , K. Vijay-Shanker

Training multiple agents to coordinate is an essential problem with applications in robotics, game theory, economics, and social sciences. However, most existing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods are online and thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Paul Barde , Jakob Foerster , Derek Nowrouzezahrai , Amy Zhang

Dynamic Reinforcement Learning (Dynamic RL), proposed in this paper, directly controls system dynamics, instead of the actor (action-generating neural network) outputs at each moment, bringing about a major qualitative shift in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Katsunari Shibata

Team competition in multi-agent Markov games is an increasingly important setting for multi-agent reinforcement learning, due to its general applicability in modeling many real-life situations. Multi-agent actor-critic methods are the most…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Paramita Koley , Aurghya Maiti , Niloy Ganguly , Sourangshu Bhattacharya

In this paper, we propose a model-free adaptive learning solution for a model-following control problem. This approach employs policy iteration, to find an optimal adaptive control solution. It utilizes a moving finite-horizon of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-07 Mohammed I. Abouheaf , Hashim A. Hashim , Mohammad A. Mayyas , Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis