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Diffusion Policy (DP) has attracted significant attention as an effective method for policy representation due to its capacity to model multi-distribution dynamics. However, current DPs are often based on a single visual modality (e.g., RGB…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Jiahang Cao , Qiang Zhang , Hanzhong Guo , Jiaxu Wang , Hao Cheng , Renjing Xu

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Offline policy improvement faces an inherent conflict between maximizing value and fitting the data distribution. While in-sample weighted regression is stable, it suffers from over-conservatism that suppresses high-value actions in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiaxin Zhao , Weihang Pan , Xun Liang , Binbin Lin

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is environment generalization: a policy trained to solve a task in one environment often fails to solve the same task in a slightly different test environment. A common approach to improve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Wenxuan Zhou , Lerrel Pinto , Abhinav Gupta

High-quality labeled data are essential for reliable statistical inference, but are often limited by validation costs. While surrogate labels provide cost-effective alternatives, their noise can introduce non-negligible bias. To address…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-29 Jianmin Chen , Huiyuan Wang , Thomas Lumley , Xiaowu Dai , Yong Chen

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-01-28 Mikko Lauri , Nikolay Atanasov , George J. Pappas , Risto Ritala

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Zhengpeng Xie , Qiang Zhang , Fan Yang , Marco Hutter , Renjing Xu

The predict-then-optimize (PTO) framework is indispensable for addressing practical stochastic decision-making tasks. It consists of two crucial steps: initially predicting unknown parameters of an optimization model and subsequently…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-20 Jixian Liu , Tao Xu , Jianping He , Chongrong Fang

Intelligent surgical robots have the potential to revolutionize clinical practice by enabling more precise and automated surgical procedures. However, the automation of such robot for surgical tasks remains under-explored compared to recent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Chonlam Ho , Jianshu Hu , Lei Song , Hesheng Wang , Qi Dou , Yutong Ban

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-23 Emmeran Johnson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Patrick Rebeschini

Despite the advances in probabilistic model checking, the scalability of the verification methods remains limited. In particular, the state space often becomes extremely large when instantiating parameterized Markov decision processes…

In tabular case, when the reward and environment dynamics are known, policy evaluation can be written as $\bm{V}_{\bm{\pi}} = (I - \gamma P_{\bm{\pi}})^{-1} \bm{r}_{\bm{\pi}}$, where $P_{\bm{\pi}}$ is the state transition matrix given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Sitao Luan , Xiao-Wen Chang , Doina Precup

This paper suggests that by operationalizing the concept of commitment in the shape of a model, a new insight is provided in improving software processes - a more human centered approach as opposed to various technical approaches available.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-03-27 Pekka Abrahamsson

Classical proportional--integral--derivative (PID) control is widely employed in industrial applications; however, achieving higher performance often motivates the adoption of model predictive control (MPC). Although gradient-based methods…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Teruki Kato , Koshi Oishi , Seigo Ito

In this paper, we propose a novel policy iteration method, called dynamic policy programming (DPP), to estimate the optimal policy in the infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. We prove the finite-iteration and asymptotic l\infty-norm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-09 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Vicenc Gomez , Hilbert J. Kappen

We propose a general framework, dubbed Stochastic Processing under Imperfect Information (SPII), to study the impact of information constraints and memories on dynamic resource allocation. The framework involves a Stochastic Processing…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-08-26 Kuang Xu , Yuan Zhong

Approaches to policy optimization have been motivated from diverse principles, based on how the parametric model is interpreted (e.g. value versus policy representation) or how the learning objective is formulated, yet they share a common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ramki Gummadi , Saurabh Kumar , Junfeng Wen , Dale Schuurmans

Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Liyu Chen , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg