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Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…
Policy iteration is one of the classical frameworks of reinforcement learning, which requires a known initial stabilizing control. However, finding the initial stabilizing control depends on the known system model. To relax this requirement…
Stochastic resetting, where a dynamical process is intermittently returned to a fixed reference state, has emerged as a powerful mechanism for optimizing first-passage properties. Existing theory largely treats static, non-learning…
We study data-driven learning of robust stochastic control for infinite-horizon systems with potentially continuous state and action spaces. In many managerial settings--supply chains, finance, manufacturing, services, and dynamic…
We consider a nonlinear discrete stochastic control system, and our goal is to design a feedback control policy in order to lead the system to a prespecified state. We adopt a stochastic approximation viewpoint of this problem. It is known…
We consider the problem of learning control policies in discrete-time stochastic systems which guarantee that the system stabilizes within some specified stabilization region with probability~$1$. Our approach is based on the novel notion…
Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…
Policy search methods are crucial in reinforcement learning, offering a framework to address continuous state-action and partially observable problems. However, the complexity of exploring vast policy spaces can lead to significant…
This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…
This paper studies the approximation of optimal control policies by quantized (discretized) policies for a very general class of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The problem is motivated by applications in networked control systems,…
This paper studies an optimal control problem for continuous-time stochastic systems subject to reachability objectives specified in a subclass of metric interval temporal logic specifications, a temporal logic with real-time constraints.…
Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…
Counterfactual reasoning from logged data has become increasingly important for many applications such as web advertising or healthcare. In this paper, we address the problem of learning stochastic policies with continuous actions from the…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a popular approach for solving fixed-point equations where the information is corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider an SA involving a contraction mapping with respect to an arbitrary norm, and show…
Robust control seeks stabilizing policies that perform reliably under adversarial disturbances, with $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ control as a classical formulation. It is known that policy optimization of robust $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ control…
We develop a general approach to the Policy Improvement Algorithm (PIA) for stochastic control problems for continuous-time processes. The main results assume only that the controls lie in a compact metric space and give general sufficient…
In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…