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We investigate robust model-free reinforcement learning algorithms designed for environments that may be dynamic or even adversarial. Traditional state-based policies often struggle to accommodate the challenges imposed by the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Udaya Ghai , Arushi Gupta , Wenhan Xia , Karan Singh , Elad Hazan

We present new policy mirror descent (PMD) methods for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems with either strongly convex or general convex regularizers. By exploring the structural properties of these overall highly nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Guanghui Lan

The complexity of modern control systems necessitates architectures that achieve high performance while ensuring robust stability, particularly for nonlinear systems. In this work, we tackle the challenge of designing output-feedback…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-16 Clara Lucía Galimberti , Luca Furieri , Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate

Lagrangian methods are widely used algorithms for constrained optimization problems, but their learning dynamics exhibit oscillations and overshoot which, when applied to safe reinforcement learning, leads to constraint-violating behavior…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Adam Stooke , Joshua Achiam , Pieter Abbeel

This paper presents a novel approach to reinforcement learning (RL) for control systems that provides probabilistic stability guarantees using finite data. Leveraging Lyapunov's method, we propose a probabilistic stability theorem that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Minghao Han , Lixian Zhang , Chenliang Liu , Zhipeng Zhou , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

Reinforcement learning methods often produce brittle policies -- policies that perform well during training, but generalize poorly beyond their direct training experience, thus becoming unstable under small disturbances. To address this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Sergey Pankov

Reinforcement learning (RL) is promising for complicated stochastic nonlinear control problems. Without using a mathematical model, an optimal controller can be learned from data evaluated by certain performance criteria through…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-16 Minghao Han , Yuan Tian , Lixian Zhang , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

Reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to the problem of tuning PID controllers in several applications. The existing methods often utilize function approximation, such as neural networks, to update the controller parameters…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-04-10 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros , Alberto Bemporad

A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent observes its states through observations, which may contain natural measurement errors or adversarial noises. Since the observations deviate from the true states, they can mislead the agent into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Huan Zhang , Hongge Chen , Chaowei Xiao , Bo Li , Mingyan Liu , Duane Boning , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) uses model-free techniques to optimize task-specific control policies. Despite having emerged as a promising approach for complex problems, RL is still hard to use reliably for real-world applications. Apart…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Siddhant Gangapurwala , Alexander Mitchell , Ioannis Havoutis

This work proposes a two-layered control scheme for constrained nonlinear systems represented by a class of recurrent neural networks and affected by additive disturbances. In particular, a base controller ensures global or regional…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-27 Daniele Ravasio , Danilo Saccani , Marcello Farina , Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a powerful and theoretically sound methodology for sequential decision-making. However, it is not directly applicable to Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to the inaccessibility of explicit action-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Pietro Novelli , Marco Pratticò , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

This paper delves into designing stabilizing feedback control gains for continuous linear systems with unknown state matrix, in which the control is subject to a general structural constraint. We bring forth the ideas from reinforcement…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-11 Sayak Mukherjee , Thanh Long Vu

Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds. Focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Richard Cheng , Abhinav Verma , Gabor Orosz , Swarat Chaudhuri , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick

The growing scale and complexity of safety-critical control systems underscore the need to evolve current control architectures aiming for the unparalleled performances achievable through state-of-the-art optimization and machine learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-30 Luca Furieri , Clara Lucía Galimberti , Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate

Enforcing state and input constraints during reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state spaces is an open but crucial problem which remains a roadblock to using RL in safety-critical applications. This paper leverages invariant sets to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-06-28 Ankush Chakrabarty , Rien Quirynen , Claus Danielson , Weinan Gao

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has emerged as an effective tool for developing controllers for legged robots. However, vanilla deep RL often requires a tremendous amount of training samples and is not feasible for achieving robust…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Ren Liu , Nitish Sontakke , Sehoon Ha