English
Related papers

Related papers: Continuous-time q-learning for mean-field control …

200 papers

In this work, we present the first finite-time analysis of Q-learning with time-varying learning policies (i.e., on-policy sampling) for discounted Markov decision processes under minimal assumptions, requiring only the existence of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Phalguni Nanda , Zaiwei Chen

The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nino Vieillard , Marcin Andrychowicz , Anton Raichuk , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

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

We introduce a continuous policy-value iteration algorithm where the approximations of the value function of a stochastic control problem and the optimal control are simultaneously updated through Langevin-type dynamics. This framework…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-11 Qi Feng , Gu Wang

This paper develops a quantized Q-learning algorithm for the optimal control of controlled diffusion processes on $\mathbb{R}^d$ under both discounted and ergodic (average) cost criteria. We first establish near-optimality of finite-state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-16 Erhan Bayraktar , Ali D. Kara , Somnath Pradhan , Serdar Yuksel

We study the exploratory Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) equation arising from the entropy-regularized exploratory control problem, which was formulated by Wang, Zariphopoulou and Zhou (J. Mach. Learn. Res., 21, 2020) in the context of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-22 Wenpin Tang , Paul Yuming Zhang , Xun Yu Zhou

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

In this note, we study a class of indefinite stochastic McKean-Vlasov linear-quadratic (LQ in short) control problem under the control taking nonnegative values. In contrast to the conventional issue, both the classical dynamic programming…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-05 Xun Li , Liangquan Zhang

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 study in this paper a class of constrained linear-quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem formulations for the scalar-state stochastic system with multiplicative noise, which has various applications, especially in the financial risk…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-09-19 Weipin Wu , Jianjun Gao , Duan Li , Yun Shi

Soft policies in reinforcement learning define policies as Boltzmann distributions over state-action value functions, providing a principled mechanism for balancing exploration and exploitation. However, realizing such soft policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Donghyeon Ki , Hee-Jun Ahn , Kyungyoon Kim , Byung-Jun Lee

In this paper, we introduce a regularized mean-field game and study learning of this game under an infinite-horizon discounted reward function. Regularization is introduced by adding a strongly concave regularization function to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-11 Berkay Anahtarci , Can Deha Kariksiz , Naci Saldi

For a general entropy-regularized time-inconsistent stochastic control problem, we propose a policy iteration algorithm (PIA) and establish its convergence to an equilibrium policy with an exponential convergence rate. The design of the PIA…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-27 Yu-Jui Huang , Xiang Yu , Keyu Zhang

We study a Q learning algorithm for continuous time stochastic control problems. The proposed algorithm uses the sampled state process by discretizing the state and control action spaces under piece-wise constant control processes. We show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-10 Erhan Bayraktar , Ali Devran Kara

We introduce a one-step generative policy for offline reinforcement learning that maps noise directly to actions via a residual reformulation of MeanFlow, making it compatible with Q-learning. While one-step Gaussian policies enable fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Zeyuan Wang , Da Li , Yulin Chen , Ye Shi , Liang Bai , Tianyuan Yu , Yanwei Fu

This work addresses stochastic optimal control problems where the unknown state evolves in continuous time while partial, noisy, and possibly controllable measurements are only available in discrete time. We develop a framework for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-19 Christian Bayer , Boualem Djehiche , Eliza Rezvanova , Raul Fidel Tempone

Dynamic programming principle (DPP) is fundamental for control and optimization, including Markov decision problems (MDPs), reinforcement learning (RL), and more recently mean-field controls (MFCs). However, in the learning framework of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-18 Haotian Gu , Xin Guo , Xiaoli Wei , Renyuan Xu

In this paper, we propose several approaches to learn the optimal population-dependent controls in order to solve mean field control problems (MFC). Such policies enable us to solve MFC problems with forms of common noises at a level of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-21 Gokce Dayanikli , Mathieu Lauriere , Jiacheng Zhang

Decision-theoretic planning is a popular approach to sequential decision making problems, because it treats uncertainty in sensing and acting in a principled way. In single-agent frameworks like MDPs and POMDPs, planning can be carried out…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-11-02 Frans A. Oliehoek , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Nikos Vlassis

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