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We address the problem of offline learning a policy that avoids undesirable demonstrations. Unlike conventional offline imitation learning approaches that aim to imitate expert or near-optimal demonstrations, our setting involves avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Huy Hoang , Tien Mai , Pradeep Varakantham

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a new family of probabilistic samplers where an agent learns a stochastic policy for generating complex combinatorial structure through a series of decision-making steps. Despite being inspired from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Dinghuai Zhang , Ling Pan , Ricky T. Q. Chen , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

Self-imitation learning motivated by lower-bound Q-learning is a novel and effective approach for off-policy learning. In this work, we propose a n-step lower bound which generalizes the original return-based lower-bound Q-learning, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yunhao Tang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra

We present a midpoint policy iteration algorithm to solve linear quadratic optimal control problems in both model-based and model-free settings. The algorithm is a variation of Newton's method, and we show that in the model-based setting it…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-16 Benjamin Gravell , Iman Shames , Tyler Summers

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) were developed to learn policies for efficiently sampling combinatorial candidates by interpreting their generative processes as trajectories in directed acyclic graphs. In the value-based training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Puhua Niu , Shili Wu , Xiaoning Qian

In this work we study the convergence of gradient methods for nonconvex optimization problems -- specifically the effect of the problem formulation to the convergence behavior of the solution of a gradient flow. We show through a simple…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-03 Moh Kamalul Wafi , Arthur Castello B. de Oliveira , Eduardo D. Sontag

Stability issues with reinforcement learning methods persist. To better understand some of these stability and convergence issues involving deep reinforcement learning methods, we examine a simple linear quadratic example. We interpret the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Lingyi Yang

Policy gradient methods are a powerful family of reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control that optimize a policy directly. However, standard first-order methods often converge slowly. Second-order methods can accelerate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Amirreza Valaei , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sadegh Soudjani

We propose Flow-Anchored Noise-conditioned Q-Learning (FAN), a highly efficient and high-performing offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. Recent work has shown that expressive flow policies and distributional critics improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Sungyoung Lee , Dohyeong Kim , Eshan Balachandar , Zelal Su Mustafaoglu , Keshav Pingali

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a family of generative models that learn to sample objects with probabilities proportional to a given reward function. The key concept behind GFlowNets is the use of two stochastic policies: a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Timofei Gritsaev , Nikita Morozov , Sergey Samsonov , Daniil Tiapkin

The recently proposed generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a method of training a policy to sample compositional discrete objects with probabilities proportional to a given reward via a sequence of actions. GFlowNets exploit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Daniil Tiapkin , Nikita Morozov , Alexey Naumov , Dmitry Vetrov

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-27 Christoph Reisinger , Wolfgang Stockinger , Yufei Zhang

Robots can acquire complex manipulation skills by learning policies from expert demonstrations, which is often known as vision-based imitation learning. Generating policies based on diffusion and flow matching models has been shown to be…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Qinglun Zhang , Zhen Liu , Haoqiang Fan , Guanghui Liu , Bing Zeng , Shuaicheng Liu

In this paper, for POMDPs, we provide the convergence of a Q learning algorithm for control policies using a finite history of past observations and control actions, and, consequentially, we establish near optimality of such limit Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

Diffusion policies have achieved great success in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their strong expressive capacity. However, the inference of diffusion policy models relies on a slow iterative sampling process, which limits their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Tianyi Chen , Haitong Ma , Na Li , Kai Wang , Bo Dai

We propose Q-Policy, a hybrid quantum-classical reinforcement learning (RL) framework that mathematically accelerates policy evaluation and optimization by exploiting quantum computing primitives. Q-Policy encodes value functions in quantum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Kalyan Cherukuri , Aarav Lala , Yash Yardi

In this work, we present a new model-free and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, that is capable of finding a near-optimal policy with state-action observations from arbitrary behavior policies. Our algorithm, called the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-21 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee , Niao He

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

This paper proposes and analyzes two new policy learning methods: regularized policy gradient (RPG) and iterative policy optimization (IPO), for a class of discounted linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems over an infinite time horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-08 Xin Guo , Xinyu Li , Renyuan Xu