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A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Yuanhao Wang , Ruosong Wang , Sham M. Kakade

Q-learning methods represent a commonly used class of algorithms in reinforcement learning: they are generally efficient and simple, and can be combined readily with function approximators for deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-28 Justin Fu , Aviral Kumar , Matthew Soh , Sergey Levine

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

Soft Q-learning is a variation of Q-learning designed to solve entropy regularized Markov decision problems where an agent aims to maximize the entropy regularized value function. Despite its empirical success, there have been limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

Multi-distribution learning extends agnostic Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning to the setting in which a family of $k$ distributions, $\{D_i\}_{i\in[k]}$, is considered and a classifier's performance is measured by its error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Chicheng Zhang , Yihan Zhou

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

We study learning problems involving arbitrary classes of functions $F$, distributions $X$ and targets $Y$. Because proper learning procedures, i.e., procedures that are only allowed to select functions in $F$, tend to perform poorly unless…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-17 Shahar Mendelson

This paper presents the first non-asymptotic result showing that a model-free algorithm can achieve a logarithmic cumulative regret for episodic tabular reinforcement learning if there exists a strictly positive sub-optimality gap in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Kunhe Yang , Lin F. Yang , Simon S. Du

We give the first agnostic, efficient, proper learning algorithm for monotone Boolean functions. Given $2^{\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon)}$ uniformly random examples of an unknown function $f:\{\pm 1\}^n \rightarrow \{\pm 1\}$, our…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Jane Lange , Arsen Vasilyan

Popular Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning approaches require the computation of expected state visitation frequencies for the optimal policy under an estimate of the reward function. This usually requires intermediate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Gabriel Kalweit , Maria Huegle , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

The field of quickest change detection (QCD) focuses on the design and analysis of online algorithms that estimate the time at which a significant event occurs. In this paper, design and analysis are cast in a Bayesian framework, where QCD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Austin Cooper , Sean Meyn

The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) with complex model classes. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, Monotonic Q-Learning with Upper Confidence Bound (MQL-UCB) for RL with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Q-functions are widely used in discrete-time learning and control to model future costs arising from a given control policy, when the initial state and input are given. Although some of their properties are understood, Q-functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-21 Joseph Warrington

Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

The challenge of approximating functions in infinite-dimensional spaces from finite samples is widely regarded as formidable. We delve into the challenging problem of the numerical approximation of Sobolev-smooth functions defined on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-11 Massimo Fornasier , Pascal Heid , Giacomo Enrico Sodini

Deep Q-learning based algorithms have been applied successfully in many decision making problems, while their theoretical foundations are not as well understood. In this paper, we study a Fitted Q-Iteration with two-layer ReLU neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Mudit Gaur , Vaneet Aggarwal , Mridul Agarwal

We present an argument based on the multidimensional and the uniform central limit theorems, proving that, under some geometrical assumptions between the target function $T$ and the learning class $F$, the excess risk of the empirical risk…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-02-25 Guillaume Lecué , Shahar Mendelson

Applying Q-learning to high-dimensional or continuous action spaces can be difficult due to the required maximization over the set of possible actions. Motivated by techniques from amortized inference, we replace the expensive maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Tom Van de Wiele , David Warde-Farley , Andriy Mnih , Volodymyr Mnih

Using deep neural nets as function approximator for reinforcement learning tasks have recently been shown to be very powerful for solving problems approaching real-world complexity. Using these results as a benchmark, we discuss the role…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-21 Vincent François-Lavet , Raphael Fonteneau , Damien Ernst