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A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Pavel Osinenko , Dmitrii Dobriborsci , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have renewed interest in reward design for shaping agent behavior, but manually crafting reward functions is tedious and error-prone. A principled alternative is to specify behavioral…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Milad Kazemi , Mateo Perez , Fabio Somenzi , Sadegh Soudjani , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Remi Munos , Bert Kappen

Recent years have seen a rise in interest in terms of using machine learning, particularly reinforcement learning (RL), for production scheduling problems of varying degrees of complexity. The general approach is to break down the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Alexandru Rinciog , Anne Meyer

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

With the decreasing cost of data collection, the space of variables or features that can be used to characterize a particular predictor of interest continues to grow exponentially. Therefore, identifying the most characterizing features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Sali Rasoul , Sodiq Adewole , Alphonse Akakpo

Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) plays an important role in applying RL algorithms to safety-critical real-world applications, addressing the trade-off between maximizing rewards and adhering to safety constraints. This work introduces a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Fan Yang , Wenxuan Zhou , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao , David Held

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

In this paper we consider the basic version of Reinforcement Learning (RL) that involves computing optimal data driven (adaptive) policies for Markovian decision process with unknown transition probabilities. We provide a brief survey of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Wesley Cowan , Michael N. Katehakis , Daniel Pirutinsky

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

Reinforcement learning usually assumes a given or sometimes even fixed environment in which an agent seeks an optimal policy to maximize its long-term discounted reward. In contrast, we consider agents that are not limited to passive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Ziqing Lu , Babak Hassibi , Lifeng Lai , Weiyu Xu

An internet network service provider manages its network with multiple objectives, such as high quality of service (QoS) and minimum computing resource usage. To achieve these objectives, a reinforcement learning-based (RL) algorithm has…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-06-17 DongNyeong Heo , Daniela Noemi Rim , Heeyoul Choi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods have seen their paramount successes in solving serial decision-making and control problems in recent years. For conventional RL formulations, Markov Decision Process (MDP) and state-action-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Ziyao Zhang , Liang Ma , Kin K. Leung , Konstantinos Poularakis , Mudhakar Srivatsa

Power grid load scheduling is a critical task that ensures the balance between electricity generation and consumption while minimizing operational costs and maintaining grid stability. Traditional optimization methods often struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Dongwen Luo

Average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, average-reward MDPs have remained largely unexplored in reinforcement learning (RL) settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attraction in the academia and tech industry with launches to a variety of impactful applications and products. Although research is being actively conducted on many fronts (e.g., offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Ruiyang Xu , Zhengxing Chen

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi