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Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is a promising approach for pretraining generalist policies on large datasets of reward-free trajectories, akin to the self-supervised objectives used to train foundation models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 John L. Zhou , Jonathan C. Kao

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benefits to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Matthew McLeod , Chunlok Lo , Matthew Schlegel , Andrew Jacobsen , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White , Adam White

In this paper, the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is addressed to reconstruct the unknown cost function underlying an observed optimal policy in a model-free manner, whose online adaptation with completely off-policy system…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-20 Yibei Li , Yuexin Cao , Zhixin Liu , Lihua Xie

Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Bohan Zhang , Michael Chen , A. Pavan , N. V. Vinodchandran , Lin F. Yang , Ruosong Wang

We develop a neural-network framework for multi-period risk--reward stochastic control problems with constrained two-step feedback policies that may be discontinuous in the state. We allow a broad class of objectives built on a…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-09 Chang Chen , Duy-Minh Dang

Dynamic Programming (DP) provides standard algorithms to solve Markov Decision Processes. However, these algorithms generally do not optimize a scalar objective function. In this paper, we draw connections between DP and (constrained)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Nino Vieillard , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

Optimal motion planning involves obstacles avoidance where path planning is the key to success in optimal motion planning. Due to the computational demands, most of the path planning algorithms can not be employed for real-time based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Geesara Kulathunga

Offline policy improvement faces an inherent conflict between maximizing value and fitting the data distribution. While in-sample weighted regression is stable, it suffers from over-conservatism that suppresses high-value actions in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiaxin Zhao , Weihang Pan , Xun Liang , Binbin Lin

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-28 Dar Gilboa , Sam Buchanan , John Wright

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

Designing biological sequences with desired properties is challenging due to vast search spaces and limited evaluation budgets. Although reinforcement learning methods use proxy models for rapid reward evaluation, insufficient training data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Hyeonah Kim , Minsu Kim , Taeyoung Yun , Sanghyeok Choi , Emmanuel Bengio , Alex Hernández-García , Jinkyoo Park

Data acquisition efficiency is a central challenge in deploying reinforcement learning in business and healthcare operations, where interactions are costly, slow, and often involve humans in the loop. This paper develops a unified large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Mingjie Hu , Jian-Qiang Hu , Enlu Zhou

Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems. They rely on fresh on-policy data, making them sample-inefficient and requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Alessandro Montenegro , Federico Mansutti , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Dynamic Programming suffers from the curse of dimensionality due to large state and action spaces, a challenge further compounded by uncertainties in the environment. To mitigate these issue, we explore an off-policy based Temporal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Ali Forootani , Raffaele Iervolino , Massimo Tipaldi , Mohammad Khosravi

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy learns to maximize cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. Towards conservative strategy, current methods choose to regularize the behavior policy or learn a lower bound of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Yuhang Jiang , Shuncheng He , Xiangyang Ji

Despite the success achieved by the analysis of supervised learning algorithms in the framework of statistical mechanics, reinforcement learning has remained largely untouched. Here we move towards closing the gap by analyzing the dynamics…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-09-02 Riccardo Fabbricatore , Vladimir V. Palyulin