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Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Rui Liu , Alex Olshevsky

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods for finding optimal policies in linear quadratic (LQ) mean field control (MFC) problems over an infinite horizon in continuous time, with common noise and entropy regularization. We study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-06 Noufel Frikha , Huyên Pham , Xuanye Song

In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-07 Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Lucas Janson , Marco Pavone

How much does a trained RL policy actually use its past observations? We propose \emph{Temporal Range}, a model-agnostic metric that treats first-order sensitivities of multiple vector outputs across a temporal window to the input sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Rodney Lafuente-Mercado , Daniela Rus , T. Konstantin Rusch

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs, have recently shown strong results in pretraining. However, due to their lack of tractable sequence-level likelihoods, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Anthony Zhan

Recent advances of gradient temporal-difference methods allow to learn off-policy multiple value functions in parallel with- out sacrificing convergence guarantees or computational efficiency. This opens up new possibilities for sound…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-22 Anna Harutyunyan , Tim Brys , Peter Vrancx , Ann Nowe

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

We introduce the FRactional-Order graph Neural Dynamical network (FROND), a new continuous graph neural network (GNN) framework. Unlike traditional continuous GNNs that rely on integer-order differential equations, FROND employs the Caputo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Qiyu Kang , Kai Zhao , Qinxu Ding , Feng Ji , Xuhao Li , Wenfei Liang , Yang Song , Wee Peng Tay

Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Yang Liu , Prajit Ramachandran , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

Common policy gradient methods rely on the maximization of a sequence of surrogate functions. In recent years, many such surrogate functions have been proposed, most without strong theoretical guarantees, leading to algorithms such as TRPO,…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities in solving complex real-world problems. Yet, the internal mechanisms driving these complex reasoning behaviors remain opaque. Existing interpretability approaches targeting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Changming Li , Kaixing Zhang , Haoyun Xu , Yingdong Shi , Zheng Zhang , Kaitao Song , Kan Ren

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the setting of continuous time and space, for an infinite horizon with a discounted objective and the underlying dynamics driven by a stochastic differential equation. Built upon recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Hanyang Zhao , Wenpin Tang , David D. Yao

We present the Generalized Policy Gradient (GPG) Theorem, specifically designed for Transformer-based policies. Notably, we demonstrate that both standard Policy Gradient Theorem and GRPO emerge as special cases within our GPG framework.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Hangyu Mao , Guangting Dong , Zhicheng Dou

Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the…

We propose an epoch-based reinforcement learning algorithm for infinite-horizon average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) that leverages a partial order over a policy class. In this structure, $\pi' \leq \pi$ if data collected under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-07 Zhongjun Zhang , Shipra Agrawal , Ilan Lobel , Sean R. Sinclair , Christina Lee Yu

Projected policy gradient (PPG) is a basic policy optimization method in reinforcement learning. Given access to exact policy evaluations, previous studies have established the sublinear convergence of PPG for sufficiently small step sizes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-19 Jiacai Liu , Wenye Li , Dachao Lin , Ke Wei , Zhihua Zhang

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) methods, such as Trust Region policy optimization and Proximal policy optimization (PPO), have become the dominant reinforcement learning algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-22 J. G. Dai , Mark Gluzman