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We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those involving sparse rewards. While action chunking is a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, using RL to directly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Jiarui Yang , Bin Zhu , Jingjing Chen , Yu-Gang Jiang

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Reinforcement learning with multiple, potentially conflicting objectives is pervasive in real-world applications, while this problem remains theoretically under-explored. This paper tackles the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Tianchen Zhou , FNU Hairi , Haibo Yang , Jia Liu , Tian Tong , Fan Yang , Michinari Momma , Yan Gao

An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-19 Boris Belousov , Jan Peters

We study the convergence of the actor-critic algorithm with nonlinear function approximation under a nonconvex-nonconcave primal-dual formulation. Stochastic gradient descent ascent is applied with an adaptive proximal term for robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Jing Dong , Li Shen , Yinggan Xu , Baoxiang Wang

We study a multi-agent reinforcement learning dynamics, and analyze its asymptotic behavior in infinite-horizon discounted Markov potential games. We focus on the independent and decentralized setting, where players do not know the game…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Chinmay Maheshwari , Manxi Wu , Druv Pai , Shankar Sastry

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Akshay Dharmavaram , Matthew Riemer , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Navdeep Kumar , Priyank Agrawal , Giorgia Ramponi , Kfir Yehuda Levy , Shie Mannor

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomizes both the timing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Yijie Huang , Mengge Li , Xiang Yu , Zhou Zhou

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

Actor-critic (AC) is a powerful method for learning an optimal policy in reinforcement learning, where the critic uses algorithms, e.g., temporal difference (TD) learning with function approximation, to evaluate the current policy and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yudan Wang , Yue Wang , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-18 Rahul Misra , Manuela L. Bujorianu , Rafał Wisniewski

Actor-critic methods for decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) facilitate collaborative optimal decision making without centralized coordination, thus enabling a wide range of applications in practice. To date, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Zhiyao Zhang , Myeung Suk Oh , FNU Hairi , Ziyue Luo , Alvaro Velasquez , Jia Liu