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Motivated by practical applications where stable long-term performance is critical-such as robotics, operations research, and healthcare-we study the problem of distributionally robust (DR) average-reward reinforcement learning. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zijun Chen , Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

In reinforcement learning (RL) theory, the concept of most confusing instances is central to establishing regret lower bounds, that is, the minimal exploration needed to solve a problem. Given a reference model and its optimal policy, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Waris Radji , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study the model-based reward-free reinforcement learning with linear function approximation for episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, the agent works in two phases. In the exploration phase, the agent interacts with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents can learn an effective policy directly from repeated interactions with a black-box environment. However in practice, the algorithms often require large amounts of training experience to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-29 Parth Chadha

Real-world sequential decision making problems commonly involve partial observability, which requires the agent to maintain a memory of history in order to infer the latent states, plan and make good decisions. Coping with partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Yonathan Efroni , Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Sobhan Miryoosefi

In order to mitigate the sample complexity of real-world reinforcement learning, common practice is to first train a policy in a simulator where samples are cheap, and then deploy this policy in the real world, with the hope that it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Huang , Liyiming Ke , Byron Boots , Kevin Jamieson , Abhishek Gupta

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo , Sumitra Ganesh

Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) has attracted attention due to its capability to enhance reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, in terms of data efficiency and generalizability. In this paper, we develop a bilevel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

We study Reinforcement Learning (RL) in environments with large state spaces, where function approximation is required for sample-efficient learning. Departing from a long history of prior work, we consider the weakest possible form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Gene Li , Ayush Sekhari

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Sample complexity and safety are major challenges when learning policies with reinforcement learning for real-world tasks, especially when the policies are represented using rich function approximators like deep neural networks. Model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Aravind Rajeswaran , Sarvjeet Ghotra , Balaraman Ravindran , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Linh Le Pham Van , Hung The Tran , Sunil Gupta

Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Garrett Thomas , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

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

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for episodic Markov decision processes (MDP) whose transition probability is parametrized by an unknown transition core with features of state and action. Despite much recent progress in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-19 Taehyun Hwang , Min-hwan Oh

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Aristide Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-16 Aristide C. Y. Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis