Dissimilarity-Based Markov Decision Processes for Stabilizing State Distributions
Organizations: Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan · LY Corporation, Japan · Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan · University of Waterloo, Canada ·
Abstract
Reinforcement learning for stochastic systems typically optimizes expected cumulative rewards, while reliable and repeatable behavior also depends on how the state distribution evolves over time. Optimizing expected return alone does not guarantee that this distribution converges to a desired target or remains stable. This paper develops a theoretical framework for learning policies that stabilize state distributions. We formulate the problem as a Dissimilarity-based Markov Decision Process (DMDP), in which the policy acts on the current state distribution and the objective measures its dissimilarity to a target distribution. We establish sufficient conditions under which the optimal policy makes the target distribution asymptotically stable. To support policy learning, we introduce a finite-dimensional representation of distributions and show how stability guarantees for its parameter dynamics extend to the underlying state distributions. We further develop certificates for the learned policies, including their deployment using estimated distribution parameters. These results quantify how learning and estimation errors affect the guarantees and identify conditions under which learned policies retain asymptotic stability. For practical implementation, we combine distribution estimates and target-dependent rewards with PPO and SAC. A computable example on a linear system illustrates the proposed theoretical certificates. Furthermore, experiments on a HalfCheetah task demonstrate the benefits of distribution feedback and explicit target matching for regulating the velocity distribution.
Figures & tables
| Approach | Distribution cost | Distribution feedback | Distributional stability | Certified learned policies | Nonlinear dynamics | Infinite horizon |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norm-based MDPs ( Puterman, 1994 ; Sutton & Barto, 2018 ) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lyapunov-based learning control ( Perkins & Barto, 2002 ; Berkenkamp et al., 2017 ; Chang et al., 2019 ) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Measure-functional MDPs ( Gros & Zanon, 2022 ; Kordabad & Gros, 2022 ) | ✓ | ( ✓ ) | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Mean-field MDPs and control ( Motte & Pham, 2022 ; Bäuerle, 2023 ; Carmona et al., 2023 ) | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Finite-horizon distribution steering ( Chen et al., 2016 ; Balci & Bakolas, 2021 ) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Belief-state MDPs ( Kaelbling et al., 1998 ) | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Method | return | cost | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAC | |||||||
| SAC-Lag | |||||||
| Distributional | |||||||
| SAC |
| end of training | evaluation, | evaluation, | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | 10–90% range | 10–90% range | 10–90% range | |||
| SAC | ||||||
| SAC-Lag | ||||||
| Distributional SAC | ||||||
| Distributional SAC-Lag | ||||||
| Implicit DMDP (SAC) | ||||||
Appendix figures & tables18 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Result | Hypothesis | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| All | closure; -compatibility with | exact | Gaussian AR(1); |
| All | compact and positively invariant under every closed loop | exact; for by construction | Lemma 2 ; projected |
| Thm. 2 | optimal ; finite, continuous, Bellman identity; ; , | exact | Lemma 2 ; |
| Thms. 3 – 5 | and the sups over | numerical | with ; maxima over 11,822 points (20,016 for ); 80,000 independent points change , , of the deployed run by at most |
| Thm. 3 | fails | offset ; not used by ( 21 ) | |
| Thm. 3 | learned margin with ; with probability | computed; fails at | per run; maximum of 49 runs, confidence |
| Data | or (median) | or | or | residual radius | smallest residual | limit distance | failed |
| Thm. 3 , offline | |||||||
| – | 5/50 | ||||||
| – | 0/50 | ||||||
| – | 0/50 | ||||||
| – | 0/50 | ||||||
| Thm. 4 , online plug-in | |||||||
| Method | Policy input | Reward | Reward critic | Target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPO / SAC | expected return | – | ||
| PPO-Lag / SAC-Lag | expected return | – | ||
| Distributional PPO / SAC | quantiles of the return | – | ||
| Distributional PPO-Lag / SAC-Lag | quantiles of the return | – | ||
| Implicit DMDP (PPO/SAC) | and | quantiles of the return | – | |
| Implicit DMDP-Lag (PPO/SAC) | and | quantiles of the return | – |
| Environment | SafetyHalfCheetahVelocity-v1 ( Ji et al., 2023 ) , MuJoCo ( Todorov et al., 2012 ) ; |
|---|---|
| , | ; |
| , | torso velocity from to ; torso pitch of in |
| , | ; , |
| ; | |
| , | i.i.d. ; training: per episode |
| PPO | SAC | |
| Steps | ; envs; update/step; random | |
| Batches | epochs minibatches | buffer ; minibatch |
| Networks | , ; normalized inputs | , ReLU |
| Policy | Gaussian, | -Gaussian, |
| Critics | , ; GAE ( Schulman et al., 2016 ) | , , ; Polyak |
| Actor | clip on ( Schulman et al., 2017 ; Ray et al., 2019 ) | ( Ha et al., 2021 ) |
| Method | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAC | |||||
| SAC-Lag | |||||
| Distributional SAC | |||||
| Distributional SAC-Lag | |||||
| Implicit DMDP (SAC) | |||||
| Method | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| with PPO | ||||||
| PPO | ||||||
| PPO-Lag | ||||||
| Distributional PPO | ||||||
| Distributional PPO-Lag | ||||||
| Implicit DMDP (PPO) | ||||||
| Method | return | cost | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPO | |||||||
| PPO-Lag | |||||||
| Distributional | |||||||
| PPO |
| end of training | evaluation, | evaluation, | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | 10–90% range | 10–90% range | 10–90% range | |||
| PPO | ||||||
| PPO-Lag | ||||||
| Distributional PPO | ||||||
| Distributional PPO-Lag | ||||||
| Implicit DMDP (PPO) | ||||||
| Method | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPO | |||||
| PPO-Lag | |||||
| Distributional PPO | |||||
| Distributional PPO-Lag | |||||
| Implicit DMDP (PPO) | |||||
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