The paper investigates continuous‑time stochastic control problems with unknown drift and running reward functions, using an exploratory reinforcement learning framework that incorporates relaxed controls and entropy regularization. It develops policy‑iteration algorithms based on probabilistic representations of the optimal value function and its gradient, proving convergence and demonstrating performance through numerical examples. The study also extends to a special case with control‑dependent diffusion, requiring a Hessian representation.
By Jin Ma, Gaozhan Wang, Jianfeng Zhang, Xunyu Zhou
arXiv:2602. 05379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data to improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy optimization.
By Hua Zheng, Wei Xie, M. Ben Feng, Keilung Choy
The paper introduces a model‑free continuous‑time reinforcement learning algorithm that learns from a fixed batch of discrete‑time off‑policy data. It builds on the PhiBE‑Q framework to create a PhiBE‑PI policy iteration that uses a single state‑action critic, avoiding explicit drift or diffusion estimation. The authors provide a local end‑to‑end suboptimality guarantee under linear function approximation, analyze error propagation from discretization, function approximation, and finite samples, and reveal a bias‑variance trade‑off where finer time discretization can worsen statistical error.
By Chaorui Yao, Yuming Paul Zhang, Lin Yang, Yuhua Zhu
arXiv:2606. 04275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a novel theoretical framework for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous environments by modeling the problem as a continuous-time stochastic process, drawing on insights from stochastic control.
By Saket Tiwari, Tejas Kotwal, George Konidaris
The paper introduces Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes (DA‑MDPs), a framework that extends Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning to diffusion-based policies. DA‑MDPs treat each reverse‑diffusion step as an RL decision, deriving a tractable reverse‑KL bound that decomposes across denoising transitions and yields diffusion‑augmented soft rewards, value functions, and policy objectives. The authors implement this framework with PPO, REPPO, and a maximum‑entropy WPO variant, showing improved continuous‑control performance, higher success rates on manipulation tasks, and memory‑efficient training with action chunking.
By Sebastian Sanokowski, Kaustubh Patil, Majid Khadiv
arXiv:2610.19783v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of learning a policy that can outperform what is shown in the data. However, in practice, such systems su...
By Zhiyuan Zhou, Sergey Levine
The paper introduces a continuous‑time policy gradient framework that works with discrete observation data. It derives performance difference lemmas and policy gradient formulas for randomized and parametrized policies, proving exponential convergence for an entropy‑regularized policy flow and providing explicit convergence bounds for discrete updates. By integrating with PhiBE, the authors create model‑free actor‑critic algorithms that maintain the continuous‑time structure, and demonstrate their effectiveness on both linear‑quadratic and nonlinear robotic control tasks.
By Martin Hernandez, Xinyan Qing, Mo Zhou, Yuhua Zhu
arXiv:2607. 06935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly grounded in tools from probability, optimization, and operator theory.
By Denis Belomestny, Alexander Gasnikov, Egor Gladin, Alexey Naumov, Artemy Rubtsov, Yuri Sapronov, Daniil Tiapkin, Nikita Yudin
arXiv:2609.06882v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Diffusion policies offer a powerful and expressive parameterization for continuous control. Yet, their integration with reinforcement learning remain...
By Mahmoud Selim, Cristina Cipriani, Karl H. Johansson
arXiv:2606. 16846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the operator-theoretic core of Q-learning in continuous-time stochastic control with continuous states and actions.
By Qian Qi
arXiv:2606. 05888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retry-based objectives such as pass@K and max@K optimize the best return obtained from multiple sampled trajectories, and recent work has shown that they can promote exploration without explicit exploration bonuses.
By Soichiro Nishimori, Paavo Parmas
arXiv:2606. 20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms.
By Hsiao-Ru Pan, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf