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Reinforcement learning (RL) -- algorithms that teach artificial agents to interact with environments by maximising reward signals -- has achieved significant success in recent years. These successes have been facilitated by advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Llewyn Salt , Marcus Gallagher

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Alexander David Goldie , Chris Lu , Matthew Thomas Jackson , Shimon Whiteson , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

In recent years, by leveraging more data, computation, and diverse tasks, learned optimizers have achieved remarkable success in supervised learning, outperforming classical hand-designed optimizers. Reinforcement learning (RL) is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Qingfeng Lan , A. Rupam Mahmood , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-18 Rahul Misra , Manuela L. Bujorianu , Rafał Wisniewski

Traditional supervised learning mostly works on individual tasks and requires training on a large set of task-specific examples. This paradigm seriously hinders the development of task generalization since preparing a task-specific example…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Jiasheng Gu , Hongyu Zhao , Hanzi Xu , Liangyu Nie , Hongyuan Mei , Wenpeng Yin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a fixed batch of data. Due to errors in value estimation from out-of-distribution actions, most offline RL algorithms take the approach of constraining or regularizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Scott Fujimoto , Shixiang Shane Gu

Ensuring that reinforcement learning (RL) controllers satisfy safety and reliability constraints in real-world settings remains challenging: state-avoidance and constrained Markov decision processes often fail to capture trajectory-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Calin Belta , Ming C. Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Michael Janner , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-11-17 L. P. Kaelbling , M. L. Littman , A. W. Moore

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important machine learning paradigm for solving sequential decision-making problems. Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in this field due to the rapid development of deep neural networks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Chaofan Pan , Xin Yang , Yanhua Li , Wei Wei , Tianrui Li , Bo An , Jiye Liang

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks' distribution cannot be captured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Giulia Denevi , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jiachen Xi , Alfredo Garcia , Petar Momcilovic

In recent years, there has been a growing trend of applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) in financial applications. This approach has shown great potential to solve decision-making tasks in finance. In this survey, we present a comprehensive…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-11-21 Yahui Bai , Yuhe Gao , Runzhe Wan , Sheng Zhang , Rui Song

Reinforcement Learning and, recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning are popular methods for solving sequential decision-making problems modeled as Markov Decision Processes. RL modeling of a problem and selecting algorithms and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Reza Refaei Afshar , Joaquin Vanschoren , Uzay Kaymak , Rui Zhang , Yaoxin Wu , Wen Song , Yingqian Zhang

Reward machines (RMs) are a recent formalism for representing the reward function of a reinforcement learning task through a finite-state machine whose edges encode subgoals of the task using high-level events. The structure of RMs enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Mark Law , Anders Jonsson , Krysia Broda , Alessandra Russo

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu