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Deep neural networks, when optimized with sufficient data, provide accurate representations of high-dimensional functions; in contrast, function approximation techniques that have predominated in scientific computing do not scale well with…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2021-03-15 Grant M. Rotskoff , Andrew R. Mitchell , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

Being able to reason in an environment with a large number of discrete actions is essential to bringing reinforcement learning to a larger class of problems. Recommender systems, industrial plants and language models are only some of the…

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) acquires meta-policies that show good performance for tasks in a wide task distribution. However, conventional meta-RL, which learns meta-policies by randomly sampling tasks, has been reported to show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Morio Matsumoto , Hiroya Matsuba , Toshihiro Kujirai

We study the optimal sample complexity in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems with policy space generalization, i.e. the agent has a prior knowledge that the optimal policy lies in a known policy space. Existing results show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Wenlong Mou , Zheng Wen , Xi Chen

This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provide excellent generative modeling capability, practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Tommaso Biancalani , Sergey Levine

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) holds promise for data-efficiency by planning with model-generated experience in addition to learning with experience from the environment. However, in complex or changing environments, models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Esra'a Saleh , John D. Martin , Anna Koop , Arash Pourzarabi , Michael Bowling

As machine learning has moved towards leveraging large models as priors for downstream tasks, the community has debated the right form of prior for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems. If one were to try to prefetch as much…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Chongyi Zheng , Royina Karegoudra Jayanth , Benjamin Eysenbach

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Stone Tao , Arth Shukla , Tse-kai Chan , Hao Su

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

Many real-world systems problems require reasoning about the long term consequences of actions taken to configure and manage the system. These problems with delayed and often sequentially aggregated reward, are often inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Ameer Haj-Ali , Nesreen K. Ahmed , Ted Willke , Joseph Gonzalez , Krste Asanovic , Ion Stoica

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Although recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of mastering complicated decision-making tasks, the sample complexity of these methods has remained a hurdle to utilizing them in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Saeed Moazami , Peggy Doerschuk

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

We study the learning dynamics of self-predictive learning for reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that learn representations by minimizing the prediction error of their own future latent representations. Despite its recent…

Data selection is essential for training deep learning models. An effective data sampler assigns proper sampling probability for training data and helps the model converge to a good local minimum with high performance. Previous studies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Jiawei Yao , Chuming Li , Canran Xiao

We hypothesize that empirically studying the sample complexity of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for the practical applications of RL in the real world. Several recent works have demonstrated the ability to learn policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Samin Yeasar Arnob , Riashat Islam , Doina Precup

This survey (re)introduces reinforcement learning methods to economists. The curse of dimensionality limits how far exact dynamic programming can be effectively applied, forcing us to rely on suitably "small" problems or our ability to…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-25 Pranjal Rawat

A common assumption about neural networks is that they can learn an appropriate internal representations on their own, see e.g. end-to-end learning. In this work we challenge this assumption. We consider two simple tasks and show that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Krisztian Buza

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a data efficient approach for learning control tasks but is difficult to utilize in domains with complex observations such as images. In this paper, we present a method for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Marvin Zhang , Sharad Vikram , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel , Matthew J. Johnson , Sergey Levine