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Policy evaluation or value function or Q-function approximation is a key procedure in reinforcement learning (RL). It is a necessary component of policy iteration and can be used for variance reduction in policy gradient methods. Therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-17 Xinyan Yan , Krzysztof Choromanski , Byron Boots , Vikas Sindhwani

In this work we propose an approach to learn a robust policy for solving the pivoting task. Recently, several model-free continuous control algorithms were shown to learn successful policies without prior knowledge of the dynamics of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Rika Antonova , Silvia Cruciani , Christian Smith , Danica Kragic

Recent advances of gradient temporal-difference methods allow to learn off-policy multiple value functions in parallel with- out sacrificing convergence guarantees or computational efficiency. This opens up new possibilities for sound…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-22 Anna Harutyunyan , Tim Brys , Peter Vrancx , Ann Nowe

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning over episodes of a finite-horizon deterministic system and as a solution propose optimistic constraint propagation (OCP), an algorithm designed to synthesize efficient exploration and value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-08 Zheng Wen , Benjamin Van Roy

Understanding a \textit{reinforcement learning} policy, which guides state-to-action mappings to maximize rewards, necessitates an accompanying explanation for human comprehension. In this paper, we introduce a set of \textit{linear…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Mikihisa Yuasa , Huy T. Tran , Ramavarapu S. Sreenivas

Reward maximization, safe exploration, and intrinsic motivation are often studied as separate objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). We present a unified geometric framework, that views these goals as instances of a single optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Nikola Milosevic , Nico Scherf

There have been key advancements to building universal approximators for multi-goal collections of reinforcement learning value functions -- key elements in estimating long-term returns of states in a parameterized manner. We extend this to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Rushiv Arora

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

We propose a new approach to value function approximation which combines linear temporal difference reinforcement learning with subspace identification. In practical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) is complicated by the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Byron Boots , Geoffrey J. Gordon

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function that generates a given optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process. This paper looks at an algorithmic-independent geometric analysis of the IRL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

We introduce machine learning methodology to the study of lattice polytopes. With supervised learning techniques, we predict standard properties such as volume, dual volume, reflexivity, etc, with accuracies up to 100%. We focus on 2d…

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Reinforcement learning means learning a policy--a mapping of observations into actions--based on feedback from the environment. The learning can be viewed as browsing a set of policies while evaluating them by trial through interaction with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Leonid Peshkin , Virginia Savova

We study policy gradient for mean-field control in continuous time in a reinforcement learning setting. By considering randomised policies with entropy regularisation, we derive a gradient expectation representation of the value function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-14 Noufel Frikha , Maximilien Germain , Mathieu Laurière , Huyên Pham , Xuanye Song

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

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

Value factorization is a popular paradigm for designing scalable multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms. However, current factorization methods make choices without full justification that may limit their performance. For example,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Enrico Marchesini , Andrea Baisero , Rupali Bhati , Christopher Amato

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

This paper investigates the impact of the loss function in value-based methods for reinforcement learning through an analysis of underlying prediction objectives. We theoretically show that mean absolute error is a better prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Alex Ayoub , David Szepesvári , Alireza Bakhtiari , Csaba Szepesvári , Dale Schuurmans