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We study computationally and statistically efficient reinforcement learning under the linear $Q^{\pi}$ realizability assumption, where any policy's $Q$-function is linear in a given state-action feature representation. Prior methods in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yijing Ke , Zihan Zhang , Ruosong Wang

Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular exploration techniques in reinforcement learning (RL). However, most TS algorithms with theoretical guarantees are difficult to implement and not generalizable to Deep RL. While the emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Haque Ishfaq , Yixin Tan , Yu Yang , Qingfeng Lan , Jianfeng Lu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Doina Precup , Pan Xu

Many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require making decisions in continuous action environments. In particular, determining the optimal dose level plays a vital role in developing medical treatment regimes. One…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Yuhan Li , Wenzhuo Zhou , Ruoqing Zhu

In many practical uses of reinforcement learning (RL) the set of actions available at a given state is a random variable, with realizations governed by an exogenous stochastic process. Somewhat surprisingly, the foundations for such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Craig Boutilier , Alon Cohen , Amit Daniely , Avinatan Hassidim , Yishay Mansour , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Dale Schuurmans

The goal of the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is to recover the reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, the IRL problem like any ill-posed inverse problem suffers the congenital defect that the policy may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-26 Ce Ju

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an effective test-time compute scaling (TTCS) method for improving the reasoning performance of large language models, but its highly variable execution time leads to severe long-tail latency in practice.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Hongbeen Kim , Juhyun Lee , Sanghyeon Lee , Kwanghoon Choi , Jaehyuk Huh

Although parallelism has been extensively used in reinforcement learning (RL), the quantitative effects of parallel exploration are not well understood theoretically. We study the benefits of simple parallel exploration for reward-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Boxiang Lyu , Sanmi Koyejo , Mladen Kolar

Optimizing or sampling complex cost functions of combinatorial optimization problems is a longstanding challenge across disciplines and applications. When employing family of conventional algorithms based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Dmitrii Dobrynin , Masoud Mohseni , John Paul Strachan

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

This paper proposes a synergy of amortised and particle-based methods for sampling from distributions defined by unnormalised density functions. We state a connection between sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and neural sequential samplers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sanghyeok Choi , Sarthak Mittal , Víctor Elvira , Jinkyoo Park , Nikolay Malkin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic navigation, allowing robots to learn through trial and error. However, real-world robotic tasks often suffer from sparse rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and…

While reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework for learning through trial and error, translating RL algorithms into the real world has remained challenging. A major hurdle to real-world application arises from the development of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Archit Sharma , Rehaan Ahmad , Chelsea Finn

Studying how to fine-tune offline reinforcement learning (RL) pre-trained policy is profoundly significant for enhancing the sample efficiency of RL algorithms. However, directly fine-tuning pre-trained policies often results in sub-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Ziqi Zhang , Xiao Xiong , Zifeng Zhuang , Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang

Much research has been done to analyze the stock market. After all, if one can determine a pattern in the chaotic frenzy of transactions, then they could make a hefty profit from capitalizing on these insights. As such, the goal of our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ziyi Zhou , Nicholas Stern , Julien Laasri

In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Ted Moskovitz , Brendan O'Donoghue , Vivek Veeriah , Sebastian Flennerhag , Satinder Singh , Tom Zahavy

In 1950, Forsythe and Leibler (1950) introduced a statistical technique for finding the inverse of a matrix by characterizing the elements of the matrix inverse as expected values of a sequence of random walks. Barto and Duff (1994)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Fletcher Lu , Dale Schuurmans

Reinforcement Learning has drawn huge interest as a tool for solving optimal control problems. Solving a given problem (task or environment) involves converging towards an optimal policy. However, there might exist multiple optimal policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Simo Alami. C , Fernando Llorente , Rim Kaddah , Luca Martino , Jesse Read

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Reinforcement learning (RL) for reachability specifications is fundamental in sequential decision-making, yet theoretical guarantees remain less explored. A recent work achieves asymptotic convergence to optimal policies. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Amogh Palasamudram , Jakub Svoboda , Suguman Bansal , Krishnendu Chatterjee

LLM-driven program evolution has emerged as a powerful tool for automated scientific discovery, yet existing frameworks offer no principled guide for designing their individual components and provide no guarantee that the search converges.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jiachen Jiang , Huminhao Zhu , Zhihui Zhu