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Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which aligns a diffusion model with input prompt, has become a crucial step in building reliable generative AI models. Most works in this area use a discrete-time formulation, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Hanyang Zhao , Haoxian Chen , Ji Zhang , David D. Yao , Wenpin Tang

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Kalman filtering is a cornerstone of estimation theory, yet learning the optimal filter under unknown and potentially singular noise covariances remains a fundamental challenge. In this paper, we revisit this problem through the lens of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-08 Larsen Bier , Shahriar Talebi

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) satisfying \emph{linear Bellman completeness} -- a fundamental setting where the Bellman backup of any linear value function remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zakaria Mhammedi , Alexander Rakhlin , Nneka Okolo

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

The field of quickest change detection (QCD) concerns design and analysis of algorithms to estimate in real time the time at which an important event takes place, and identify properties of the post-change behavior. It is shown in this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-16 Austin Cooper , Sean Meyn

This paper investigates the problem of designing control policies that satisfy high-level specifications described by signal temporal logic (STL) in unknown, stochastic environments. While many existing works concentrate on optimizing the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-16 Siqi Wang , Shaoyuan Li , Li Yin , Xiang Yin

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been widely used for a range of complex control tasks. However, slow convergence and sample inefficiency remain challenging problems in RL, especially when handling continuous and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Wenjie Shi , Shiji Song , Hui Wu , Ya-Chu Hsu , Cheng Wu , Gao Huang

This work presents a technique for learning systems, where the learning process is guided by knowledge of the physics of the system. In particular, we solve the problem of the two-point boundary optimal control problem of linear…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-05-03 Vasanth Reddy , Hoda Eldardiry , Almuatazbellah Boker

The optimal execution problem has always been a continuously focused research issue, and many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been studied. In this article, we consider the execution problem of targeting the volume weighted…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-12 Xingyu Zhou , Wenbin Chen , Mingyu Xu

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

This paper studies the problem of steering the distribution of a discrete-time dynamical system from an initial distribution to a target distribution in finite time. The formulation is fully nonlinear, allowing the use of general control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-05 George Rapakoulias , Panagiotis Tsiotras

In large-scale distributed machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas , Hamed Hassani

In this paper, we investigate a class of time-inconsistent discrete-time stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problems, whose time-consistent solutions consist of an open-loop equilibrium control and a linear feedback equilibrium…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-03-07 Xun Li , Yuan-Hua Ni , Ji-Feng Zhang

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) studies the evolution of full return distributions under Bellman updates rather than focusing on expected values. A classical result is that the distributional Bellman operator is contractive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Keru Wang , Yixin Deng , Yao Lyu , Stephen Redmond , Shengbo Eben Li

We prove a general existence result in stochastic optimal control in discrete time where controls take values in conditional metric spaces, and depend on the current state and the information of past decisions through the evolution of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-19 Asgar Jamneshan , Michael Kupper , José Miguel Zapata

Although reinforcement learning (RL) can provide reliable solutions in many settings, practitioners are often wary of the discrepancies between the RL solution and their status quo procedures. Therefore, they may be reluctant to adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Mohammadreza Nazari , Majid Jahani , Lawrence V. Snyder , Martin Takáč

This article explores the discrete-time stochastic optimal LQR control with delay and quadratic constraints. The inclusion of delay, compared to delay-free optimal LQR control with quadratic constraints, significantly increases the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-19 Dawei Liu , Juanjuan Xu , huanshui Zhang