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Domain randomization in reinforcement learning is an established technique for increasing the robustness of control policies trained in simulation. By randomizing environment properties during training, the learned policy can become robust…

The Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) problem is a classic and widely studied model in optimal control, providing a fundamental framework for designing controllers for linear systems subject to process and observation noises. In recent years,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Haoran Li , Xun Li , Yuan-Hua Ni , Xuebo Zhang

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

Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used for sim2real transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in robotics. Most DR approaches require a simulator with a fixed set of tunable parameters from the start of the training, from which…

Reinforcement learning encounters many challenges when applied directly in the real world. Sim-to-real transfer is widely used to transfer the knowledge learned from simulation to the real world. Domain randomization -- one of the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Xiaoyu Chen , Jiachen Hu , Chi Jin , Lihong Li , Liwei Wang

We consider policy gradient algorithms for the indefinite least squares stationary optimal control, e.g., linear-quadratic-regulator (LQR) with indefinite state and input penalization matrices. Such a setup has important applications in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-13 Jingjing Bu , Mehran Mesbahi

The distributed subgradient method (DSG) is a widely discussed algorithm to cope with large-scale distributed optimization problems in the arising machine learning applications. Most exisiting works on DSG focus on ideal communication…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-08-24 Zhaoyue Xia , Jun Du , Yong Ren

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-08 Nicole Mücke

Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hongjian Lan , Yucong Liu , Florian Schäfer

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Nicole Bäuerle , Athanasios Vasileiadis

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments, particularly when system parameters are unknown. This paper investigates RL-based control for entropy-regularized…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-02 Gabriel Diaz , Lucky Li , Wenhao Zhang

Distortion Risk Measures (DRMs) capture risk preferences in decision-making and serve as general criteria for managing uncertainty. This paper proposes gradient descent algorithms for DRM optimization based on two dual representations: the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jinyang Jiang , Bernd Heidergott , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

Optimal control of stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems is a major challenge in the domain of robot learning. Given the intractability of the global control problem, state-of-the-art algorithms focus on approximate sequential optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-23 Joe Watson , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

Dual control explicitly addresses the problem of trading off active exploration and exploitation in the optimal control of partially unknown systems. While the problem can be cast in the framework of stochastic dynamic programming, exact…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-11-12 Elena Arcari , Lukas Hewing , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Simulation-to-real transfer using domain randomization for robot control often relies on low-gear-ratio, backdrivable actuators, but these approaches break down when the sim-to-real gap widens. Inspired by the traditional PID controller, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yuta Kawachi

The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Ján Drgoňa , Sayak Mukherjee , Aaron Tuor , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Draguna Vrabie

We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-01 Robert Denkert , Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin

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

Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Kaiqing Zhang , Xiangyuan Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

Learning visuomotor policies in simulation is much safer and cheaper than in the real world. However, due to discrepancies between the simulated and real data, simulator-trained policies often fail when transferred to real robots. One…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Ricardo Garcia , Robin Strudel , Shizhe Chen , Etienne Arlaud , Ivan Laptev , Cordelia Schmid