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In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Xu-Hui Liu , Zhenghai Xue , Jing-Cheng Pang , Shengyi Jiang , Feng Xu , Yang Yu

Regret matching (RM) -- and its modern variants -- is a foundational online algorithm that has been at the heart of many AI breakthrough results in solving benchmark zero-sum games, such as poker. Yet, surprisingly little is known so far in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Ioannis Anagnostides , Emanuel Tewolde , Brian Hu Zhang , Ioannis Panageas , Vincent Conitzer , Tuomas Sandholm

We study the problem of episodic reinforcement learning in continuous state-action spaces with unknown rewards and transitions. Specifically, we consider the setting where the rewards and transitions are modeled using parametric bilinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Reda Ouhamma , Debabrota Basu , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

Online learning has traditionally focused on the expected rewards. In this paper, a risk-averse online learning problem under the performance measure of the mean-variance of the rewards is studied. Both the bandit and full information…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-15 Sattar Vakili , Alexis Boukouvalas , Qing Zhao

This paper studies a recent proposal to use randomized value functions to drive exploration in reinforcement learning. These randomized value functions are generated by injecting random noise into the training data, making the approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Daniel Russo

Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Young Hun Jung , Ambuj Tewari

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

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

The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Firas Jarboui , Ahmed Akakzia

We study agents acting in an unknown environment where the agent's goal is to find a robust policy. We consider robust policies as policies that achieve high cumulative rewards for all possible environments. To this end, we consider agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Raghav Bongole , Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

We present an approach for the quantification of the usefulness of transfer in reinforcement learning via regret bounds for a multi-agent setting. Considering a number of $\aleph$ agents operating in the same Markov decision process,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Adrienne Tuynman , Ronald Ortner

We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Bingkui Tong , Junpei Komiyama , Soichiro Nishimori , Paavo Parmas

Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with KL-regularized objectives can enjoy faster rates of convergence or logarithmic regret, in contrast to the classical $\sqrt{T}$-type regret in the unregularized setting. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Heyang Zhao , Qiwei Di , Quanquan Gu

We study how a decision-maker (DM) learns from data of unknown quality to form robust, ''general-purpose'' posterior beliefs. We develop a framework for robust learning and belief formation under a minimax-regret criterion, cast as a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-18 Yeon-Koo Che , Longjian Li , Tianling Luo

This guide provides a reference for high-probability regret bounds in empirical risk minimization (ERM). The presentation is modular: we begin with intuition and general proof strategies, then state broadly applicable guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Lars van der Laan

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

We revisit the problem of online learning with sleeping experts/bandits: in each time step, only a subset of the actions are available for the algorithm to choose from (and learn about). The work of Kleinberg et al. (2010) showed that there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ehsan Emamjomeh-Zadeh , Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo , David Kempe

We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Priyank Agrawal , Shipra Agrawal

Online learning and model reference adaptive control have many interesting intersections. One area where they differ however is in how the algorithms are analyzed and what objective or metric is used to discriminate "good" algorithms from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-24 Travis E. Gibson , Sawal Acharya