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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang

Delays are inherent to most dynamical systems. Besides shifting the process in time, they can significantly affect their performance. For this reason, it is usually valuable to study the delay and account for it. Because they are dynamical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-21 Pierre Liotet

We consider a reinforcement learning setting introduced in (Maillard et al., NIPS 2011) where the learner does not have explicit access to the states of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP). Instead, she has access to several models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-09-16 Ronald Ortner , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Daniil Ryabko

We consider model selection for classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments -- Multi Armed Bandits (MABs) and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) -- under general function approximations. In the model selection framework, we do not know…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-08 Avishek Ghosh , Sayak Ray Chowdhury

In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), the learning rate critically influences both stability and performance, yet its optimal value shifts during training as the environment and policy evolve. Standard decay schedulers assume monotonic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Henrique Donâncio , Antoine Barrier , Leah F. South , Florence Forbes

Modern recommender systems aim to improve user experience. As reinforcement learning (RL) naturally fits this objective -- maximizing an user's reward per session -- it has become an emerging topic in recommender systems. Developing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Xin Xin , Tiago Pimentel , Alexandros Karatzoglou , Pengjie Ren , Konstantina Christakopoulou , Zhaochun Ren

State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Nadav Timor , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv , Micah Goldblum , Yann LeCun , David Harel

The standard formulation of Reinforcement Learning lacks a practical way of specifying what are admissible and forbidden behaviors. Most often, practitioners go about the task of behavior specification by manually engineering the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Julien Roy , Roger Girgis , Joshua Romoff , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Christopher Pal

Reinforcement learning (RL) for reachability specifications is fundamental in sequential decision-making, yet theoretical guarantees remain less explored. A recent work achieves asymptotic convergence to optimal policies. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Amogh Palasamudram , Jakub Svoboda , Suguman Bansal , Krishnendu Chatterjee

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) are a widely used framework for sequential decision-making under parameter uncertainty. RMDPs have been extensively studied when the objective is to maximize the discounted return, but little is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-15 Julien Grand-Clément , Marek Petrik , Nicolas Vieille

In many practical uses of reinforcement learning (RL) the set of actions available at a given state is a random variable, with realizations governed by an exogenous stochastic process. Somewhat surprisingly, the foundations for such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Craig Boutilier , Alon Cohen , Amit Daniely , Avinatan Hassidim , Yishay Mansour , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Dale Schuurmans

In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-14 Tom Zahavy , Avinatan Hasidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) framework to synthesize a control policy from a given linear temporal logic (LTL) specification in an unknown stochastic environment that can be modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP).…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yu Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Miroslav Pajic

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation under drifting environment. Specifically, both the reward and state transition functions can evolve over time but their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Huozhi Zhou , Jinglin Chen , Lav R. Varshney , Ashish Jagmohan

The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Blossom Metevier , Philip S. Thomas

Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically models the interaction between the agent and environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), where the rewards that guide the agent's behavior are always observable. However, in many real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Montaser Mohammedalamen , Michael Bowling

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-15 Marcus Hutter