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We study worst-case guarantees on the expected return of fixed-dataset policy optimization algorithms. Our core contribution is a unified conceptual and mathematical framework for the study of algorithms in this regime. This analysis…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Jacob Buckman , Carles Gelada , Marc G. Bellemare

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

We consider model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary Markov decision processes. Both the reward functions and the state transition functions are allowed to vary arbitrarily over time as long as their cumulative variations do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Weichao Mao , Kaiqing Zhang , Ruihao Zhu , David Simchi-Levi , Tamer Başar

This paper brings the concept of ``optimism" to the new and promising framework of online Non-stochastic Control (NSC). Namely, we study how NSC can benefit from a prediction oracle of unknown quality responsible for forecasting future…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Naram Mhaisen , George Iosifidis

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a static logged dataset without continually interacting with the environment. The distribution shift between the learned policy and the behavior policy makes it necessary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Jiafei Lyu , Xiaoteng Ma , Xiu Li , Zongqing Lu

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative to imitation learning for behavior modeling in various domains, particularly in complex navigation tasks. An existing challenge with Offline RL is the signal-to-noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Alexi Canesse , Mathieu Petitbois , Ludovic Denoyer , Sylvain Lamprier , Rémy Portelas

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal control from a fixed dataset, without interactions with the system. An agent in this setting should avoid selecting actions whose consequences cannot be predicted from the…

Deep learning models are vulnerable to external attacks. In this paper, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based approach to generate adversarial examples for the pre-trained (target) models. We assume a semi black-box setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Mandar Kulkarni

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) have taken an iterative actor-critic approach involving off-policy evaluation. In this paper we show that simply doing one step of constrained/regularized policy improvement using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 David Brandfonbrener , William F. Whitney , Rajesh Ranganath , Joan Bruna

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic reinforcement learning - a new variant of reinforcement learning problems where the regret of selecting a suboptimal action varies under an external environmental condition known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Xiaoxiao Wang , Nader Bouacida , Xueying Guo , Xin Liu

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert behavior using only fixed demonstration data, without any additional online interaction. We propose BiCQL-ML, a policy-free offline IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Junsung Park

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms commonly compensate for overestimation bias during temporal-difference learning by utilizing pessimistic estimates of the expected target returns. In this work, we propose Generalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (Offline IRL) aims to recover the structure of rewards and environment dynamics that underlie observed actions in a fixed, finite set of demonstrations from an expert agent. Accurate models of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful data-driven control method that has been largely explored in autonomous driving tasks. However, conventional RL approaches learn control policies through trial-and-error interactions with the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Tianyu Shi , Dong Chen , Kaian Chen , Zhaojian Li

This paper studies performative risk minimization, a formulation of stochastic optimization under decision-dependent distributions. We consider the general case where the performative risk can be non-convex, for which we develop efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Sungwoo Park , Junyeop Kwon , Byeongnoh Kim , Suhyun Chae , Jeeyong Lee , Dabeen Lee

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have shown that KL-regularization plays a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of RL fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs). Despite its empirical advantage, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Heyang Zhao , Chenlu Ye , Wei Xiong , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

Unsupervised skill learning objectives (Gregor et al., 2016, Eysenbach et al., 2018) allow agents to learn rich repertoires of behavior in the absence of extrinsic rewards. They work by simultaneously training a policy to produce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-13 DJ Strouse , Kate Baumli , David Warde-Farley , Vlad Mnih , Steven Hansen