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As a generalization of reinforcement learning (RL) to parametrizable goals, goal conditioned RL (GCRL) has a broad range of applications, particularly in challenging tasks in robotics. Recent work has established that the optimal value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Khadichabonu Valieva , Bikramjit Banerjee

Average-reward reinforcement learning requires estimating the gain and the bias, which is defined only up to an additive constant. This makes direct distributional analogues ill-posed on the real line. We introduce a quotient-space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ege C. Kaya , Aliasghar Pourghani , Vijay Gupta , Abolfazl Hashemi

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular and versatile paradigm to learn reward-maximizing policies with safety guarantees. Previous works tend to express the safety constraints in an expectation form due to the ease of implementation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Chenglin Li , Guangchun Ruan , Hua Geng

Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Matthias Schultheis , Constantin A. Rothkopf , Heinz Koeppl

A fundamental question in reinforcement learning is whether model-free algorithms are sample efficient. Recently, Jin et al. \cite{jin2018q} proposed a Q-learning algorithm with UCB exploration policy, and proved it has nearly optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-30 Kefan Dong , Yuanhao Wang , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang

In this article we review recent generalisations of the central limit theorem for the sum of specially correlated (or q-independent) variables, focusing on q greater or equal than 1. Specifically, this kind of correlation turns the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-12-16 Silvio M. Duarte Queiros , Constantino Tsallis

$Q$-learning with function approximation is one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning. Though the idea of using function approximation was proposed at least 60 years ago, even in the simplest setup, i.e, approximating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Simon S. Du , Yuping Luo , Ruosong Wang , Hanrui Zhang

In this paper, we study a transfer reinforcement learning problem where the state transitions and rewards are affected by the environmental context. Specifically, we consider a demonstrator agent that has access to a context-aware policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Temporal-difference and Q-learning play a key role in deep reinforcement learning, where they are empowered by expressive nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. At the core of their empirical successes is the learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Zhaoran Wang

Although Q-learning is one of the most successful algorithms for finding the best action-value function (and thus the optimal policy) in reinforcement learning, its implementation often suffers from large overestimation of Q-function values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Huaqing Xiong , Lin Zhao , Yingbin Liang , Wei Zhang

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

We propose a new approach to solving dynamic decision problems with unbounded rewards based on the transformations used in Q-learning. In our case, the objective of the transform is to convert an unbounded dynamic program into a bounded…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-02 Qingyin Ma , John Stachurski , Alexis Akira Toda

Data in real-world application often exhibit skewed class distribution which poses an intense challenge for machine learning. Conventional classification algorithms are not effective in the case of imbalanced data distribution, and may fail…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Enlu Lin , Qiong Chen , Xiaoming Qi

We state the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in terms of preference elicitation, resulting in a principled (Bayesian) statistical formulation. This generalises previous work on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and allows us…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-06-30 Constantin Rothkopf , Christos Dimitrakakis

Q-learning suffers from overestimation bias, because it approximates the maximum action value using the maximum estimated action value. Algorithms have been proposed to reduce overestimation bias, but we lack an understanding of how bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-10 Qingfeng Lan , Yangchen Pan , Alona Fyshe , Martha White

Distributional reinforcement learning improves performance by capturing environmental stochasticity, but a comprehensive theoretical understanding of its effectiveness remains elusive. In addition, the intractable element of the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Seokhun Ju , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Achieving convergence of multiple learning agents in general $N$-player games is imperative for the development of safe and reliable machine learning (ML) algorithms and their application to autonomous systems. Yet it is known that, outside…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Aamal Abbas Hussain , Francesco Belardinelli , Georgios Piliouras

We show that discounted methods for solving continuing reinforcement learning problems can perform significantly better if they center their rewards by subtracting out the rewards' empirical average. The improvement is substantial at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Abhishek Naik , Yi Wan , Manan Tomar , Richard S. Sutton

The goal of Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is recovering a posterior distribution over reward functions using a set of demonstrations from an expert optimizing for a reward unknown to the learner. The resulting posterior over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Ondrej Bajgar , Alessandro Abate , Konstantinos Gatsis , Michael A. Osborne

We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Ali Devran Kara