New algorithm learns LQR with regret using Langevin dynamics and excitation.
arXiv research
A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Trend · papers per month
Paper uses Koopman operator and Nyström method for efficient nonlinear control.
We present the first computationally-efficient algorithm with regret for learning in Linear Quadratic Control systems with unknown dynamics. By that, we resolve an open question of Abbasi-Yadkori and Szepesvári (2011) and Dean, Mania, Matni, Recht, and Tu (2018).
We study the constrained linear quadratic regulator with unknown dynamics, addressing the tension between safety and exploration in data-driven control techniques. We present a framework which allows for system identification through persistent excitation, while maintaining safety by guaranteeing the satisfaction of st…
Efficiently solves exploration-exploitation in LQR using Lagrangian relaxation.
Paper solves time-inconsistent control problems with BSDEs.
Policy gradient converges to globally optimal policy in nearly linear-quadratic systems.
We study the global convergence of generative adversarial imitation learning for linear quadratic regulators, which is posed as minimax optimization. To address the challenges arising from non-convex-concave geometry, we analyze the alternating gradient algorithm and establish its Q-linear rate of convergence to a uniq…
Policy gradient methods converge for LQR problems with noisy state dynamics.
The main challenge for adaptive regulation of linear-quadratic systems is the trade-off between identification and control. An adaptive policy needs to address both the estimation of unknown dynamics parameters (exploration), as well as the regulation of the underlying system (exploitation). To this end, optimism-based…
New model-free algorithm achieves similar LQR regret guarantees.
We consider adaptive control of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), where an unknown linear system is controlled subject to quadratic costs. Leveraging recent developments in the estimation of linear systems and in robust controller synthesis, we present the first provably polynomial time algorithm that provides high…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a number of challenging problems. Despite these empirical successes, theoretical understanding of different algorithms is lacking, primarily due to the curse of dimensionality caused by the exponential growth of the state-action space with the number o…
New algorithms achieve logarithmic regret in learning linear quadratic control systems.
Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence is known to be fragile. To understand the instability of actor-critic, we focus o…
This work establishes safe reinforcement learning for LQR with nonlinear baselines.
New bounds for adaptive control in high dimensions without fixed state space.
We study the performance of the certainty equivalent controller on Linear Quadratic (LQ) control problems with unknown transition dynamics. We show that for both the fully and partially observed settings, the sub-optimality gap between the cost incurred by playing the certainty equivalent controller on the true system …
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully used to solve many continuous control tasks. Despite its impressive results however, fundamental questions regarding the sample complexity of RL on continuous problems remain open. We study the performance of RL in this setting by considering the behavior of the Least-S…
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 "end-to-end" approach, directly optimizing the performance metric of interest 3) they…
This paper studies how gradient descent in control systems can perform well on unseen data.
Safe RL-based vibration control using LQR guidance.
TSAC achieves optimal frequentist regret in adaptive control of LQRs.
This paper addresses the optimal control problem known as the Linear Quadratic Regulator in the case when the dynamics are unknown. We propose a multi-stage procedure, called Coarse-ID control, that estimates a model from a few experimental trials, estimates the error in that model with respect to the truth, and then d…
We study the variance of the REINFORCE policy gradient estimator in environments with continuous state and action spaces, linear dynamics, quadratic cost, and Gaussian noise. These simple environments allow us to derive bounds on the estimator variance in terms of the environment and noise parameters. We compare the pr…
We study the sample complexity of approximate policy iteration (PI) for the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), building on a recent line of work using LQR as a testbed to understand the limits of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms on continuous control tasks. Our analysis quantifies the tension between policy improv…
Modeling pollution from competing firms using mean-field games.
The effectiveness of model-based versus model-free methods is a long-standing question in reinforcement learning (RL). Motivated by recent empirical success of RL on continuous control tasks, we study the sample complexity of popular model-based and model-free algorithms on the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). We show…
Paper proposes a COP model for Algo trading using LQR.
Optimal dynamic allocation of carbon allowances reduces emissions efficiently.
New algorithm minimizes regret in unknown LQ control systems.
Study task-guided exploration in linear dynamical systems, improving sample complexity.
Optimal trading strategy using LQR framework with price mean-reversion.
We study optimal regret bounds for control in linear dynamical systems under adversarially changing strongly convex cost functions, given the knowledge of transition dynamics. This includes several well studied and fundamental frameworks such as the Kalman filter and the linear quadratic regulator. State of the art met…
We present the perceptor gradients algorithm -- a novel approach to learning symbolic representations based on the idea of decomposing an agent's policy into i) a perceptor network extracting symbols from raw observation data and ii) a task encoding program which maps the input symbols to output actions. We show that t…
Survey of theoretical foundations for policy optimization in control.
Finding optimal feedback controllers for nonlinear dynamic systems from data is hard. Recently, Bayesian optimization (BO) has been proposed as a powerful framework for direct controller tuning from experimental trials. For selecting the next query point and finding the global optimum, BO relies on a probabilistic desc…
We describe an optimal adversarial attack formulation against autoregressive time series forecast using Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). In this threat model, the environment evolves according to a dynamical system; an autoregressive model observes the current environment state and predicts its future values; an attac…
Survey explores geometric aspects of policy optimization in control systems.
Develops new optimization techniques for decision-making under uncertainty.
We study a security threat to batch reinforcement learning and control where the attacker aims to poison the learned policy. The victim is a reinforcement learner / controller which first estimates the dynamics and the rewards from a batch data set, and then solves for the optimal policy with respect to the estimates. …
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a data efficient approach for learning control tasks but is difficult to utilize in domains with complex observations such as images. In this paper, we present a method for learning representations that are suitable for iterative model-based policy improvement, e…
Paper tackles reinforcement learning generalization through invariant policy optimization.
The paper studies optimal transport in linear quadratic systems and derives interpolation inequalities.
New algorithm learns linear dynamical systems from measurements.
Efficiently extracts linear dynamics from complex observations.
New method extends fitted Q-evaluation for distributional off-policy reinforcement learning.
Algorithm reduces regret in partially observable systems by learning dynamics and using optimistic control.