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This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Akhil Agnihotri

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhiwei Shang , Xinyi Yuan , Wenjun Huang , Yunduan Cui , Di Chen , Meixin Zhu

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry

Entropy regularization is used to get improved optimization performance in reinforcement learning tasks. A common form of regularization is to maximize policy entropy to avoid premature convergence and lead to more stochastic policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Zafarali Ahmed , Doina Precup

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to learn effective policies from pre-collected datasets without the need for further environmental interactions. While promising results have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 The Viet Bui , Thanh Hong Nguyen , Tien Mai

The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nino Vieillard , Marcin Andrychowicz , Anton Raichuk , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

As one of the central tasks in machine learning, regression finds lots of applications in different fields. An existing common practice for solving regression problems is the mean square error (MSE) minimization approach or its regularized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-24 Jirong Yi , Qiaosheng Zhang , Zhen Chen , Qiao Liu , Wei Shao , Yusen He , Yaohua Wang

Deep reinforcement learning was instigated with the presence of trust region methods, being scalable and efficient. However, the pessimism of such algorithms, among which it forces to constrain in a trust region by all means, has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jianfei Ma

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Pankaj Kumar Barman , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study entropy-regularized constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the soft-max parameterization, in which an agent aims to maximize the entropy-regularized value function while satisfying constraints on the expected total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Donghao Ying , Yuhao Ding , Javad Lavaei

In most existing studies on large-scale multi-agent coordination, the control methods aim to learn discrete policies for agents with finite choices. They rarely consider selecting actions directly from continuous action spaces to provide…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Yining Chen , Ke Wang , Guanghua Song , Xiaohong Jiang

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

Aging bridge networks require proactive, verifiable, and interpretable maintenance strategies, yet reinforcement learning (RL) policies trained solely on reward signals provide no formal safety guarantees and remain opaque to infrastructure…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Dennis Gross

Despite the recent advancement in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the MARL agents easily overfit the training environment and perform poorly in the evaluation scenarios where other agents behave differently. Obtaining…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Wei Qiu , Xiao Ma , Bo An , Svetlana Obraztsova , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Franck Djeumou , Christian Ellis , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

We explore online learning in episodic loop-free Markov decision processes on non-stationary environments (changing losses and probability transitions). Our focus is on the Concave Utility Reinforcement Learning problem (CURL), an extension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Bianca Marin Moreno , Margaux Brégère , Pierre Gaillard , Nadia Oudjane

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as intelligent agents in interactive decision-making tasks. Traditional approaches often depend on meticulously designed prompts, high-quality examples, or additional reward models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Muning Wen , Junwei Liao , Cheng Deng , Jun Wang , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Among RLVR algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhaokang Liao , Yingguo Gao , Yi Yang , Yongheng Hu , Jingting Ding

In batch reinforcement learning, there can be poorly explored state-action pairs resulting in poorly learned, inaccurate models and poorly performing associated policies. Various regularization methods can mitigate the problem of learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Sarah Rathnam , Susan A. Murphy , Finale Doshi-Velez