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This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) concerns the problem of training an agent to maximize the probability of reaching target goal states. This paper presents an analysis of the goal-conditioned setting based on optimal control. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Nathan P. Lawrence , Ali Mesbah

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we classify RL into direct and indirect RL according to how they seek the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jingliang Duan , Jie Li , Yangang Ren , Qi Sun , Bo Cheng

This paper is devoted to the analysis of a finite horizon discrete-time stochastic optimal control problem, in presence of constraints. We study the regularity of the value function which comes from the dynamic programming algorithm. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2007-05-23 M. Papi , S. Sbaraglia

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Yao Mu , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Qi Sun , Bingbing Nie , Bo Cheng , Baiyu Peng

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms that learn policies by trial-and-error must learn from limited amounts of data collected by actively interacting with the environment. While many prior works have shown that proper regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Qiyang Li , Aviral Kumar , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

This work theoretically studies a ubiquitous reinforcement learning policy for controlling the canonical model of continuous-time stochastic linear-quadratic systems. We show that randomized certainty equivalent policy addresses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

We describe a new approach for managing aleatoric uncertainty in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm. Instead of selecting actions according to a single statistic, we propose a distributional method based on the second-order stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 John D. Martin , Michal Lyskawinski , Xiaohu Li , Brendan Englot

The entropy regularization is inspired by information entropy from machine learning and the ideas of exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning, which appears in the control problem to design an approximating algorithm for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-21 Ziyue Chen , Qi Zhang

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning for stochastic singular control with the application to an infinite-horizon irreversible reinsurance problems. The singular control is equivalently characterized as a pair of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-03 Zongxia Liang , Xiaodong Luo , Xiang Yu

This work uses the entropy-regularised relaxed stochastic control perspective as a principled framework for designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Herein agent interacts with the environment by generating noisy controls…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

In this paper, stochastic optimal control problems in continuous time and space are considered. In recent years, such problems have received renewed attention from the lens of reinforcement learning (RL) which is also one of our motivation.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-29 Anant A. Joshi , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Prashant G. Mehta , Sean P. Meyn

This paper considers a stochastic linear quadratic problem for discrete-time systems with multiplicative noises over an infinite horizon. To obtain the optimal solution, we propose an online iterative algorithm of reinforcement learning…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-22 Hongdan Li , Lucky Qiaofeng Li , Xun Li , Zhaorong Zhang

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

Many real-world control problems, ranging from finance to robotics, evolve in continuous time with non-uniform, event-driven decisions. Standard discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL), based on fixed-step Bellman updates, struggles in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Minh Nguyen

Many real-world control problems involve both discrete decision variables - such as the choice of control modes, gear switching or digital outputs - as well as continuous decision variables - such as velocity setpoints, control gains or…

Model-free or learning-based control, in particular, reinforcement learning (RL), is expected to be applied for complex robotic tasks. Traditional RL requires a policy to be optimized is state-dependent, that means, the policy is a kind of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Taisuke Kobayashi , Kenta Yoshizawa

Deep reinforcement learning excels in numerous large-scale practical applications. However, existing performance analyses ignores the unique characteristics of continuous-time control problems, is unable to directly estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Shuyu Yin , Qixuan Zhou , Fei Wen , Tao Luo