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We revisit in this paper the discrete-time linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem from the perspective of receding-horizon policy gradient (RHPG), a newly developed model-free learning framework for control applications. We provide a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-02 Xiangyuan Zhang , Tamer Başar

Geometry-aware optimizers such as Newton and natural gradient can improve conditioning in deep learning, but scalable variants such as K-FAC, Shampoo, and related preconditioners usually impose structural approximations early, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Simon Dufort-Labbé , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Razvan Pascanu , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Aristide Baratin

Policy gradient algorithms have been widely applied to Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning problems in recent years. Regularization with various entropy functions is often used to encourage exploration and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Haoya Li , Samarth Gupta , Hsiangfu Yu , Lexing Ying , Inderjit Dhillon

This paper proposes a novel robust reinforcement learning framework for discrete-time linear systems with model mismatch that may arise from the sim-to-real gap. A key strategy is to invoke advanced techniques from control theory. Using the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-07 Leilei Cui , Tamer Başar , Zhong-Ping Jiang

First-order stochastic methods are the state-of-the-art in large-scale machine learning optimization owing to efficient per-iteration complexity. Second-order methods, while able to provide faster convergence, have been much less explored…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-01 Naman Agarwal , Brian Bullins , Elad Hazan

We investigate reinforcement learning in the setting of Markov decision processes for a large number of exchangeable agents interacting in a mean field manner. Applications include, for example, the control of a large number of robots…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-30 René Carmona , Mathieu Laurière , Zongjun Tan

Stability is one of the most fundamental requirements for systems synthesis. In this paper, we address the stabilization problem for unknown linear systems via policy gradient (PG) methods. We leverage a key feature of PG for Linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-20 Feiran Zhao , Xingyun Fu , Keyou You

We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Tyler Westenbroek , Jacob Levy , David Fridovich-Keil

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…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Forrest Laine , Claire Tomlin

We study the global linear convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods for finite-horizon continuous-time exploratory linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems. The setting includes stochastic LQC problems with indefinite costs and allows…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-05 Michael Giegrich , Christoph Reisinger , Yufei Zhang

Owing to the growth of interest in Reinforcement Learning in the last few years, gradient based policy control methods have been gaining popularity for Control problems as well. And rightly so, since gradient policy methods have the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-01 Santanu Rathod , Manoj Bhadu , Abir De

Motivated by the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in control design, this paper analyses the intersection between results from gradient methods for the model-free linear quadratic regulator (LQR), and linear feedforward…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-05-27 Arthur Castello B. de Oliveira , Milad Siami , Eduardo D. Sontag

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

In this paper, we consider both first- and second-order techniques to address continuous optimization problems arising in machine learning. In the first-order case, we propose a framework of transition from deterministic or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Sanae Lotfi , Tiphaine Bonniot de Ruisselet , Dominique Orban , Andrea Lodi

Modern machine learning is trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD), whose performance critically depends on how the learning rate (LR) is adjusted and decreased over time. Yet existing LR regimes may be intricate, or need to tune one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Zhuang Yang

We explore the use of policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning for quantum control via energy landscape shaping of XX-Heisenberg spin chains in a model agnostic fashion. Their performance is compared to finding controllers using…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-07-19 I. Khalid , C. A. Weidner , E. A. Jonckheere , S. G. Schirmer , F. C. Langbein

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

We present the perceptor gradients algorithm -- a novel approach to learning symbolic representations based on the idea of decomposing an agent's policy into i) a perceptor network extracting symbols from raw observation data and ii) a task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-06 Svetlin Penkov , Subramanian Ramamoorthy

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