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We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

Reinforcement learning algorithms commonly seek to optimize policies for solving one particular task. How should we explore an unknown dynamical system such that the estimated model globally approximates the dynamics and allows us to solve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Cansu Sancaktar , Sebastian Blaes , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Meichen Song , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) are capable of retrieving high-performing policy for any reward function specified directly at test-time, commonly referred to as zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL). While this is a very efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Thomas Rupf , Marco Bagatella , Marin Vlastelica , Andreas Krause

We consider online sequential decision problems where an agent must balance exploration and exploitation. We derive a set of Bayesian `optimistic' policies which, in the stochastic multi-armed bandit case, includes the Thompson sampling…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-01 Brendan O'Donoghue , Tor Lattimore

Risk sensitivity has become a central theme in reinforcement learning (RL), where convex risk measures and robust formulations provide principled ways to model preferences beyond expected return. Recent extensions to multi-agent RL (MARL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Runyu Zhang , Na Li , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Gioele Zardini

The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-10-21 István Szita , András Lőrincz

We propose a novel holistic approach for safe autonomous exploration and map building based on constrained Bayesian optimisation. This method finds optimal continuous paths instead of discrete sensing locations that inherently satisfy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-03-02 Gilad Francis , Lionel Ott , Roman Marchant , Fabio Ramos

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Zero-shot reinforcement learning is necessary for extracting optimal policies in absence of concrete rewards for fast adaptation to future problem settings. Forward-backward representations (FB) have emerged as a promising method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Núria Armengol Urpí , Marin Vlastelica , Georg Martius , Stelian Coros

One principled approach for provably efficient exploration is incorporating the upper confidence bound (UCB) into the value function as a bonus. However, UCB is specified to deal with linear and tabular settings and is incompatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Chenjia Bai , Lingxiao Wang , Lei Han , Jianye Hao , Animesh Garg , Peng Liu , Zhaoran Wang

Markov decision processes are widely used for planning and verification in settings that combine controllable or adversarial choices with probabilistic behaviour. The standard analysis algorithm, value iteration, only provides a lower bound…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-10-21 Arnd Hartmanns , Benjamin Lucien Kaminski

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (RL) is capable of not only incorporating domain knowledge, but also solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma in a natural way. As Bayesian RL is intractable except for special cases, previous work has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-14 Kenji Kawaguchi , Mauricio Araya

We study the novel problem of future off-policy evaluation (F-OPE) and learning (F-OPL) for estimating and optimizing the future value of policies in non-stationary environments, where distributions vary over time. In e-commerce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Kazuki Kawamura , Takanori Muroi , Yusuke Narita , Kei Tateno , Takuma Udagawa , Yuta Saito

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) under general non-linear function approximation, and establish sample efficiency and hardness results under various standard structural assumptions. On the positive side, we propose the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Jinglin Chen , Aditya Modi , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

We present a modular approach to reinforcement learning that uses a Bayesian representation of the uncertainty over models. The approach, BOSS (Best of Sampled Set), drives exploration by sampling multiple models from the posterior and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-14 John Asmuth , Lihong Li , Michael L. Littman , Ali Nouri , David Wingate

The non-convexity and intractability of distributionally robust chance constraints make them challenging to cope with. From a data-driven perspective, we propose formulating it as a robust optimization problem to ensure that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-23 Zhiping Chen , Wentao Ma , Bingbing Ji

Although risk awareness is fundamental to an online operating agent, it has received less attention in the challenging continuous domain and under partial observability. This paper presents a novel formulation and solution for risk-averse…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Andrey Zhitnikov , Vadim Indelman

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy based on a dataset collected a priori. Due to the lack of further interactions with the environment, offline RL suffers from the insufficient coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Ying Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang