Related papers: Global Optimality of Single-Timescale Actor-Critic…
The actor-critic (AC) reinforcement learning algorithms have been the powerhouse behind many challenging applications. Nevertheless, its convergence is fragile in general. To study its instability, existing works mostly consider the…
We propose a single time-scale actor-critic algorithm to solve the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. A least squares temporal difference (LSTD) method is applied to the critic and a natural policy gradient method is used for the…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a number of challenging problems. Despite these empirical successes, theoretical understanding of different algorithms is lacking, primarily due to the curse of…
In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…
Actor-critic methods have achieved significant success in many challenging applications. However, its finite-time convergence is still poorly understood in the most practical single-timescale form. Existing works on analyzing…
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…
Many reinforcement learning methods achieve great success in practice but lack theoretical foundation. In this paper, we study the convergence analysis on the problem of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The global linear convergence…
We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…
We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…
Current research suggests the use of a liner quadratic performance index for optimal control of regulators in various applications. Some examples include correcting the trajectory of rocket and air vehicles, vibration suppression of…
While there has been substantial success for solving continuous control with actor-critic methods, simpler critic-only methods such as Q-learning find limited application in the associated high-dimensional action spaces. However, most…
We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…
Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) design is one of the most classical optimal control problems, whose well-known solution is an input sequence expressed as a state-feedback. In this work, finite-horizon and discrete-time LQR is solved under…
Actor-critic (AC) methods have exhibited great empirical success compared with other reinforcement learning algorithms, where the actor uses the policy gradient to improve the learning policy and the critic uses temporal difference learning…
The risk-neutral LQR controller is optimal for stochastic linear dynamical systems. However, the classical optimal controller performs inefficiently in the presence of low-probability yet statistically significant (risky) events. The…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully used to solve many continuous control tasks. Despite its impressive results however, fundamental questions regarding the sample complexity of RL on continuous problems remain open. We study…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…
Actor-Critic based approaches were among the first to address reinforcement learning in a general setting. Recently, these algorithms have gained renewed interest due to their generality, good convergence properties, and possible biological…
Decentralized Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms have been widely utilized for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and have achieved remarkable success. Apart from its empirical success, the theoretical convergence property of decentralized…
A method is presented for solving the discrete-time finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem subject to auxiliary linear equality constraints, such as fixed end-point constraints. The method explicitly determines an affine…