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The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Samuele Tosatto , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , A. Rupam Mahmood

This paper studies the discrete-time linear-quadratic-Gaussian mean field (MF) social control problem in an infinite horizon, where the dynamics of all agents are unknown. The objective is to design a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-05 Hanfang Zhang , Bing-Chang Wang , Shuo Chen

A dynamic mean field theory is developed for finite state and action Bayesian reinforcement learning in the large state space limit. In an analogy with statistical physics, the Bellman equation is studied as a disordered dynamical system;…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-13 George Stamatescu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) remains difficult to scale to many agents. Recent MARL using Mean Field Control (MFC) provides a tractable and rigorous approach to otherwise difficult cooperative MARL. However, the strict MFC…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Kai Cui , Christian Fabian , Anam Tahir , Heinz Koeppl

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

We develop policy gradients methods for stochastic control with exit time in a model-free setting. We propose two types of algorithms for learning either directly the optimal policy or by learning alternately the value function (critic) and…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-02-16 Mohamed Hamdouche , Pierre Henry-Labordere , Huyen Pham

Multi-agent reinforcement learning methods have shown remarkable potential in solving complex multi-agent problems but mostly lack theoretical guarantees. Recently, mean field control and mean field games have been established as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Kai Cui , Anam Tahir , Mark Sinzger , Heinz Koeppl

This study addresses the stochastic Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem for linear time-invariant systems subjected to unknown disturbance distributions. By leveraging the most recent disturbance data, we construct a set of distributions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-15 Xu Chen , Lorenz Dörschel

Despite the increasing popularity of policy gradient methods, they are yet to be widely utilized in sample-scarce applications, such as robotics. The sample efficiency could be improved by making best usage of available information. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Qingfeng Lan , Samuele Tosatto , Homayoon Farrahi , A. Rupam Mahmood

Model-based reinforcement learning has the potential to be more sample efficient than model-free approaches. However, existing model-based methods are vulnerable to model bias, which leads to poor generalization and asymptotic performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Tung-Long Vuong , Kenneth Tran

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

Model-free reinforcement learning attempts to find an optimal control action for an unknown dynamical system by directly searching over the parameter space of controllers. The convergence behavior and statistical properties of these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-17 Hesameddin Mohammadi , Armin Zare , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Mihailo R. Jovanović

In this paper, we study the global convergence of model-based and model-free policy gradient descent and natural policy gradient descent algorithms for linear quadratic deep structured teams. In such systems, agents are partitioned into a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Vida Fathi , Jalal Arabneydi , Amir G. Aghdam

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Model predictive control (MPC) schemes have a proven track record for delivering aggressive and robust performance in many challenging control tasks, coping with nonlinear system dynamics, constraints, and observational noise. Despite their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Lucas Barcelos , Alexander Lambert , Rafael Oliveira , Paulo Borges , Byron Boots , Fabio Ramos

Pre-trained diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative priors for both unconditional and conditional sample generation, yet their outputs often deviate from the characteristics of user-specific target data. Such mismatches are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Matina Mahdizadeh Sani , Nima Jamali , Mohammad Jalali , Farzan Farnia

We study mean-field control (MFC) problems with common noise using the control randomisation framework, where we substitute the control process with an independent Poisson point process, controlling its intensity instead. To address the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Robert Denkert , Idris Kharroubi , Huyên Pham

We investigate robust model-free reinforcement learning algorithms designed for environments that may be dynamic or even adversarial. Traditional state-based policies often struggle to accommodate the challenges imposed by the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Udaya Ghai , Arushi Gupta , Wenhan Xia , Karan Singh , Elad Hazan

Mean-Field Control (MFC) is a powerful tool to solve Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems. Recent studies have shown that MFC can well-approximate MARL when the population size is large and the agents are exchangeable.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal , Satish V. Ukkusuri