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Related papers: Is Q-learning Provably Efficient?

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We study lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) in a regret minimization setting of linear contextual Markov decision process (MDP), where the agent needs to learn a multi-task policy while solving a streaming sequence of tasks. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Sanae Amani , Lin F. Yang , Ching-An Cheng

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an appealing paradigm for training intelligent agents, enabling policy acquisition from the agent's own autonomously acquired experience. However, the training process of RL is far from automatic, requiring…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Zhao Yang , Thomas M. Moerland , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat , Edward S. Hu

The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, with the learning rate being particularly influential. RL algorithms fail to reach convergence or demand an extensive number of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Aida Afshar , Aldo Pacchiano

Motivated by real-world settings where data collection and policy deployment -- whether for a single agent or across multiple agents -- are costly, we study the problem of on-policy single-agent reinforcement learning (RL) and federated RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Haochen Zhang , Zhong Zheng , Lingzhou Xue

Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning (DR-RL) aims to derive a policy optimizing the worst-case performance within a predefined uncertainty set. Despite extensive research, previous DR-RL algorithms have predominantly favored…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Yudan Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yue Wang

Reinforcement learning is able to solve complex sequential decision-making tasks but is currently limited by sample efficiency and required computation. To improve sample efficiency, recent work focuses on model-based RL which interleaves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Yi Zhao , Wenshuai Zhao , Rinu Boney , Juho Kannala , Joni Pajarinen

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

Reinforcement learning has witnessed significant advancements, particularly with the emergence of model-based approaches. Among these, $Q$-learning has proven to be a powerful algorithm in model-free settings. However, the extension of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Han-Dong Lim , HyeAnn Lee , Donghwan Lee

In the optimization of dynamical systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers a model-free approach to the problem, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal , Ather Gattami

Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Hiteshi Sharma , Rahul Jain

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a class of artificial intelligence algorithms being used to design adaptive optimal controllers through online learning. This paper presents a model-free, real-time, data-efficient Q-learning-based algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-11 Ali Aalipour , Alireza Khani

The effectiveness of model-based versus model-free methods is a long-standing question in reinforcement learning (RL). Motivated by recent empirical success of RL on continuous control tasks, we study the sample complexity of popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Stephen Tu , Benjamin Recht

In this paper, we leverage ideas from model-based control to address the sample efficiency problem of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Accelerating learning is an active field of RL highly relevant in the context of time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-23 Ibrahim Ahmed , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant

Deep reinforcement learning has shown remarkable success in the past few years. Highly complex sequential decision making problems from game playing and robotics have been solved with deep model-free methods. Unfortunately, the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Aske Plaat , Walter Kosters , Mike Preuss

We propose a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approach for noisy time-dependent gate optimization with improved sample complexity over model-free RL. Sample complexity is the number of controller interactions with the physical…

We consider the task of learning to control a linear dynamical system under fixed quadratic costs, known as the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem. While model-free approaches are often favorable in practice, thus far only model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Asaf Cassel , Tomer Koren

We apply reinforcement learning (RL) to robotics tasks. One of the drawbacks of traditional RL algorithms has been their poor sample efficiency. One approach to improve the sample efficiency is model-based RL. In our model-based RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Adithya Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

Model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of learning a wide range of robotic skills, but typically require a very large number of samples to achieve good performance. Model-based algorithms, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Anusha Nagabandi , Gregory Kahn , Ronald S. Fearing , Sergey Levine

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has shown its advantages in sample-efficiency over model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). Despite the impressive results it achieves, it still faces a trade-off between the ease of data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Xiaoyu Tan , Chao Qu , Junwu Xiong , James Zhang