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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Yicheng Luo , Jackie Kay , Edward Grefenstette , Marc Peter Deisenroth

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the predominant paradigm for training large language model (LLM)-based AI agents. However, existing backbone RL algorithms lack verified convergence guarantees in agentic scenarios, especially in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Tianyi Hu , Qingxu Fu , Yanxi Chen , Zhaoyang Liu , Bolin Ding

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

The outstanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) render them a crucial component in various autonomous agent systems. While traditional methods depend on the inherent knowledge of LLMs without fine-tuning, more recent approaches…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Zhirui Deng , Zhicheng Dou , Yutao Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen , Ruibin Xiong , Mang Wang , Weipeng Chen

The common purpose of applying reinforcement learning (RL) to asset management is the maximization of profit. The extrinsic reward function used to learn an optimal strategy typically does not take into account any other preferences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Charl Maree , Christian W. Omlin

We study the welfare of a mechanism in a dynamic environment where a learning investor can make a costly investment to change her value. In many real-world problems, the common assumption that the investor always makes the best responses,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ce Li , Qianfan Zhang , Weiqiang Zheng

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for dynamic portfolio optimization under market uncertainty and risk. The proposed model integrates a Sharpe ratio-based reward function with direct risk control mechanisms,…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-11-17 Emmanuel Lwele , Sabuni Emmanuel , Sitali Gabriel Sitali

Advances in reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on massive compute resources and remain notoriously sample inefficient. In contrast, the human brain is able to efficiently learn effective control strategies using limited resources. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Burcu Küçükoğlu , Walraaf Borkent , Bodo Rueckauer , Nasir Ahmad , Umut Güçlü , Marcel van Gerven

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

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yasir Zubayr Barlas , Kizito Salako

Transfer Learning (TL) has shown great potential to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) by leveraging prior knowledge from past learned policies of relevant tasks. Existing transfer approaches either explicitly computes the similarity…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms can suffer from modeling errors between the simulation and the real world. Many studies use adversarial learning to generate perturbation during training process to model the discrepancy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Qianmei Liu , Yufei Kuang , Jie Wang

Real-time inference is a challenge of real-world reinforcement learning due to temporal differences in time-varying environments: the system collects data from the past, updates the decision model in the present, and deploys it in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Hyunin Lee , Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei , Somayeh Sojoudi

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon