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Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jasmine Bayrooti , Carl Henrik Ek , Amanda Prorok

We design a new provably efficient algorithm for episodic reinforcement learning with generalized linear function approximation. We analyze the algorithm under a new expressivity assumption that we call "optimistic closure," which is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-10 Yining Wang , Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, the classical foundations of RL do not account for the risk sensitivity of the objective function, which is critical in various fields, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Mohammad Alipour-Vaezi , Huaiyang Zhong , Kwok-Leung Tsui , Sajad Khodadadian

Reinforcement Learning, a machine learning framework for training an autonomous agent based on rewards, has shown outstanding results in various domains. However, it is known that learning a good policy is difficult in a domain where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Takahisa Imagawa , Takuya Hiraoka , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to derive improved policies entirely from historical data but often struggles with over-optimistic value estimates for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. This issue is typically mitigated via policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Wenhui Liu , Zhijian Wu , Jingchao Wang , Dingjiang Huang , Shuigeng Zhou

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guopeng Li , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Julian F. P. Kooij

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann

Risk sensitivity has become a central theme in reinforcement learning (RL), where convex risk measures and robust formulations provide principled ways to model preferences beyond expected return. Recent extensions to multi-agent RL (MARL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Runyu Zhang , Na Li , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Gioele Zardini

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely adapted due to its sample efficiency. However, existing worst-case regret analysis typically requires optimistic planning, which is not realistic in general. In contrast, motivated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-10 Lingxiao Wang , Ping Li

The optimistic nature of the Q-learning target leads to an overestimation bias, which is an inherent problem associated with standard $Q-$learning. Such a bias fails to account for the possibility of low returns, particularly in risky…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Thommen George Karimpanal , Hung Le , Majid Abdolshah , Santu Rana , Sunil Gupta , Truyen Tran , Svetha Venkatesh

AI/ML-based tools are at the forefront of resource management solutions for communication networks. Deep learning, in particular, is highly effective in facilitating fast and high-performing decision-making whenever representative training…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-04-07 George Iosifidis , Naram Mhaisen , Douglas J. Leith

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these methods in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Kamil Ciosek , Quan Vuong , Robert Loftin , Katja Hofmann

We study the exploration-exploitation dilemma in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) setting. Inspired by the extended value iteration algorithm used in optimistic algorithms for finite MDPs, we propose to relax the optimistic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-14 Marc Abeille , Alessandro Lazaric

We present a novel observation about the behavior of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: on many benchmark datasets, offline RL can produce well-performing and safe policies even when trained with "wrong" reward labels, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Anqi Li , Dipendra Misra , Andrey Kolobov , Ching-An Cheng

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL), a crucial field due to its ability to enhance decision-making in scenarios where it is essential to manage uncertainty and minimize potential adverse outcomes. Particularly, our work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Dake Zhang , Boxiang Lyu , Shuang Qiu , Mladen Kolar , Tong Zhang

The multi-agent setting is intricate and unpredictable since the behaviors of multiple agents influence one another. To address this environmental uncertainty, distributional reinforcement learning algorithms that incorporate uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Oh , Joonkee Kim , Minchan Jeong , Se-Young Yun

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved phenomenal success in various domains. However, its data-driven nature also introduces new vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious opponents. Recent work shows that a well-trained RL agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

While Bayesian-based exploration often demonstrates superior empirical performance compared to bonus-based methods in model-based reinforcement learning (RL), its theoretical understanding remains limited for model-free settings. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 He Wang , Xingyu Xu , Yuejie Chi