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Reinforcement learning can acquire complex behaviors from high-level specifications. However, defining a cost function that can be optimized effectively and encodes the correct task is challenging in practice. We explore how inverse optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Jing Dong , Xin T. Tong

This paper introduces a new formulation for stochastic optimal control and stochastic dynamic optimization that ensures safety with respect to state and control constraints. The proposed methodology brings together concepts such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-19 Marcus Aloysius Pereira , Ziyi Wang , Ioannis Exarchos , Evangelos A. Theodorou

Direct policy optimization in reinforcement learning is usually solved with policy-gradient algorithms, which optimize policy parameters via stochastic gradient ascent. This paper provides a new theoretical interpretation and justification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Adrien Bolland , Gilles Louppe , Damien Ernst

The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Mattis Manfred Kämmerer

We introduce a continuous policy-value iteration algorithm where the approximations of the value function of a stochastic control problem and the optimal control are simultaneously updated through Langevin-type dynamics. This framework…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-11 Qi Feng , Gu Wang

A new method for stochastic control based on neural networks and using randomisation of discrete random variables is proposed and applied to optimal stopping time problems. The method models directly the policy and does not need the…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2021-01-11 Thomas Deschatre , Joseph Mikael

Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hany Abdulsamad , Sahel Iqbal , Simo Särkkä

This paper formulates a stochastic optimal control problem for linear networked control systems featuring stochastic packet disordering with a unique stabilizing solution certified. The problem is solved by proposing reinforcement learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-13 Wenqian Xue , Yi Jiang , Frank L. Lewis , Bosen Lian

We are interested in optimally driving a dynamical system that can be influenced by exogenous noises. This is generally called a Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) problem and the Dynamic Programming (DP) principle is the natural way of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-12-16 Kengy Barty , Pierre Carpentier , Guy Cohen , Pierre Girardeau

In modern decentralized applications, ensuring communication efficiency and privacy for the users are the key challenges. In order to train machine-learning models, the algorithm has to communicate to the data center and sample data for its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-04 Hoang Huy Nguyen , Yan Li , Tuo Zhao

This paper considers a distributed reinforcement learning problem for decentralized linear quadratic control with partial state observations and local costs. We propose a Zero-Order Distributed Policy Optimization algorithm (ZODPO) that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-10-26 Yingying Li , Yujie Tang , Runyu Zhang , Na Li

In this work, we study the stochastic optimal control problem (SOC) mainly from the probabilistic view point, i.e. via the Stochastic Maximum principle (SMP) \cite{Peng4}. We adopt the sample-wise backpropagation scheme proposed in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Hui Sun , Feng Bao

We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Sanghyun Son , Laura Yu Zheng , Ryan Sullivan , Yi-Ling Qiao , Ming C. Lin

We prove convergence of the proximal policy gradient method for a class of constrained stochastic control problems with control in both the drift and diffusion of the state process. The problem requires either the running or terminal cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-27 Ashley Davey , Harry Zheng

Optimization problems with continuous data appear in, e.g., robust machine learning, functional data analysis, and variational inference. Here, the target function is given as an integral over a family of (continuously) indexed target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Kexin Jin , Jonas Latz , Chenguang Liu , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

This work proposes a method for solving linear stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems using sum of squares and semidefinite programming. Previous work had used polynomial optimization to approximate the value function, requiring a high…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-09-23 Matanya B. Horowitz , Ivan Papusha , Joel W. Burdick

We consider the traffic control problem of dynamic routing over parallel servers, which arises in a variety of engineering systems such as transportation and data transmission. We propose a semi-gradient, on-policy algorithm that learns an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Yidan Wu , Yu Yu , Jianan Zhang , Li Jin