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Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Tejaram Sangadi , L. A. Prashanth , Krishna Jagannathan

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning - both for symmetric and downside risk measures - has typically used direct Monte-Carlo estimation of policy gradients. While this approach yields unbiased gradient estimates, it also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Thomas Spooner , Rahul Savani

Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Ezio Bartocci , Luca Bortolussi , Tomǎš Brázdil , Dimitrios Milios , Guido Sanguinetti

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Maryam Fazel , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Mehran Mesbahi

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

This paper proposes efficient policy iteration and value iteration algorithms for the continuous-time linear quadratic regulator problem with unmeasurable states and unknown system dynamics, from the perspective of direct data-driven…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Jun Xie , Yuan-Hua Ni , Yiqin Yang , Bo Xu

This paper develops a deep policy iteration method for high-dimensional finite-horizon mean-field games (MFG). We reformulate the game as a regenerative problem with deterministic cycles, which allows policy evaluation (PE), policy…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-18 Shuixin Fang , Shupeng Wang , Zhen Wu , Hui Zhang , Tao Zhou

We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Navdeep Kumar , Yashaswini Murthy , Itai Shufaro , Kfir Y. Levy , R. Srikant , Shie Mannor

This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Jinchi Chen , Jie Feng , Weiguo Gao , Ke Wei

Policy-based reinforcement learning methods suffer from the policy collapse problem. We find valued-based reinforcement learning methods with {\epsilon}-greedy mechanism are capable of enjoying three characteristics, Closed-form Diversity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Changnan Xiao , Haosen Shi , Jiajun Fan , Shihong Deng

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Voot Tangkaratt , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Masashi Sugiyama

In this paper we study a mean field control problem in which particles are absorbed when they reach the boundary of a smooth domain. The value of the N-particle problem is described by a hierarchy of Hamilton-Jacobi equations which are…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Pierre Cardaliaguet , Joe Jackson , Panagiotis E. Souganidis

We study methods for solving stochastic control problems of systems of forward-backward mean-field equations with delay, in finite or infinite horizon. Necessary and sufficient maximum principles under partial information are given. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-10-31 Nacira Agram , Elin Engen Rose

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ziheng Cheng , Xin Guo , Yufei Zhang

In this paper, we consider discrete-time dynamic games of the mean-field type with a finite number $N$ of agents subject to an infinite-horizon discounted-cost optimality criterion. The state space of each agent is a locally compact Polish…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-01-17 Naci Saldi , Tamer Başar , Maxim Raginsky

We propose a policy iteration method to solve an inverse problem for a mean-field game (MFG) model, specifically to reconstruct the obstacle function in the game from the partial observation data of value functions, which represent the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Kui Ren , Nathan Soedjak , Shanyin Tong

Stabilizing a dynamical system is a fundamental problem that serves as a cornerstone for many complex tasks in the field of control systems. The problem becomes challenging when the system model is unknown. Among the Reinforcement Learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-30 Ankang Zhang , Ming Chi , Xiaoling Wang , Lintao Ye

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy (actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Samuel Neumann , Sungsu Lim , Ajin Joseph , Yangchen Pan , Adam White , Martha White

Reinforcement learning is a general technique that allows an agent to learn an optimal policy and interact with an environment in sequential decision making problems. The goodness of a policy is measured by its value function starting from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-30 C. Shi , S. Zhang , W. Lu , R. Song