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This paper introduces Q-learning with gradient target tracking, a novel reinforcement learning framework that provides a learned continuous target update mechanism as an alternative to the conventional hard update paradigm. In the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Bum Geun Park , Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra

We present an approach called Q-probing to adapt a pre-trained language model to maximize a task-specific reward function. At a high level, Q-probing sits between heavier approaches such as finetuning and lighter approaches such as few shot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Kenneth Li , Samy Jelassi , Hugh Zhang , Sham Kakade , Martin Wattenberg , David Brandfonbrener

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

Policy gradient methods are an attractive approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their convergence properties and robustness in partially observable scenarios. However, there is a significant performance gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Bozhidar Vasilev , Tarun Gupta , Bei Peng , Shimon Whiteson

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-21 Daochen Wang , Aarthi Sundaram , Robin Kothari , Ashish Kapoor , Martin Roetteler

Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning have achieved widespread success in many domains but remain constrained during real-world deployment. One of the main issues is the additional requirements that were not considered during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Pengcheng Wang , Xinghao Zhu , Yuxin Chen , Chenfeng Xu , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Chenran Li

On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Woogyeol Jin , Taywon Min , Yongjin Yang , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Yi Zhou , Dennis Wei , Nathalie Baracaldo , Kimin Lee

Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Mohammad Reza Bonyadi , Rui Wang , Maryam Ziaei

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments, particularly when system parameters are unknown. This paper investigates RL-based control for entropy-regularized…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-02 Gabriel Diaz , Lucky Li , Wenhao Zhang

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Lukas P. Fröhlich , Maksym Lefarov , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Felix Berkenkamp

In recent years, fully differentiable rigid body physics simulators have been developed, which can be used to simulate a wide range of robotic systems. In the context of reinforcement learning for control, these simulators theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Katie Byl

This paper studies the q-learning, recently coined as the continuous time counterpart of Q-learning by Jia and Zhou (2023), for continuous time Mckean-Vlasov control problems in the setting of entropy-regularized reinforcement learning. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Xiaoli Wei , Xiang Yu

Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Gal Dalal , Assaf Hallak , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik

In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-30 Will Dabney , Mark Rowland , Marc G. Bellemare , Rémi Munos

The potential of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is that high-capacity models trained on large, heterogeneous datasets can lead to agents that generalize broadly, analogously to similar advances in vision and NLP. However, recent works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Aviral Kumar , Rishabh Agarwal , Xinyang Geng , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

Policy gradient (PG) algorithms have been widely used in reinforcement learning (RL). However, PG algorithms rely on exploiting the value function being learned with the first-order update locally, which results in limited sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Hao Sun , Ziping Xu , Yuhang Song , Meng Fang , Jiechao Xiong , Bo Dai , Bolei Zhou

The comparative evaluation between classical and quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) paradigms was conducted to investigate their convergence behavior, robustness under observational noise, and computational efficiency in a benchmark…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-08 Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut , Nyi Wunna Tun

A primary requirement for any reinforcement learning method is that it should produce policies that improve upon the initial guess. In this work, we show that the widely used Deep Q-Network (DQN) fails to satisfy this minimal criterion --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Aditya Gopalan , Gugan Thoppe