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A basic assumption of traditional reinforcement learning is that the value of a reward does not change once it is received by an agent. The present work forgoes this assumption and considers the situation where the value of a reward decays…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Taylor Dohmen , Ashutosh Trivedi

In this work, we prove the joint convergence in distribution of $q$ variables modulo one obtained as partial sums of a sequence of i.i.d. square integrable random variables multiplied by a common factor given by some function of an…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-08-08 Roberta Flenghi , Benjamin Jourdain

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

Distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) has seen empirical success in complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the setting of nonlinear function approximation. However, there are many different ways in which one can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-24 Thang Doan , Bogdan Mazoure , Clare Lyle

Exploration and adaptation to new tasks in a transfer learning setup is a central challenge in reinforcement learning. In this work, we build on the idea of modeling a distribution over policies in a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Disha Shrivastava , Eeshan Gunesh Dhekane , Riashat Islam

``Distribution shift'' is the main obstacle to the success of offline reinforcement learning. A learning policy may take actions beyond the behavior policy's knowledge, referred to as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) actions. The Q-values for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Jing Zhang , Linjiajie Fang , Kexin Shi , Wenjia Wang , Bing-Yi Jing

Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gugan Thoppe , L. A. Prashanth , Ankur Naskar , Sanjay Bhat

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of sequential decision-making problems. Recent diffusion-based policies further improve RL by modeling complex, high-dimensional action distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Xiaofeng Xiao , Xiao Hu , Yang Ye , Xubo Yue

A primary requirement for any reinforcement learning method is that it should produce policies that improve upon the initial guess. In this work, we show that the widely used Deep Q-Network (DQN) fails to satisfy this minimal criterion --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Aditya Gopalan , Gugan Thoppe

Although distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely examined in the past few years, very few studies investigate the validity of the obtained Q-function estimator in the distributional setting. To fully understand how the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Qi Kuang , Zhoufan Zhu , Liwen Zhang , Fan Zhou

We present a reinforcement learning approach to goal based wealth management problems such as optimization of retirement plans or target dated funds. In such problems, an investor seeks to achieve a financial goal by making periodic…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2020-02-26 Matthew Dixon , Igor Halperin

In many real world applications, reinforcement learning agents have to optimize multiple objectives while following certain rules or satisfying a list of constraints. Classical methods based on reward shaping, i.e. a weighted combination of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Gabriel Kalweit , Maria Huegle , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning promises, among other benefits, to efficiently capture and utilize the temporal structure of a decision-making problem and to enhance continual learning capabilities, but theoretical guarantees lag behind…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Massimiliano Manenti , Andrea Iannelli

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-14 Haoran Wang , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Xunyu Zhou

This paper introduces EnergyFlow, a framework that unifies generative action modeling with inverse reinforcement learning by parameterizing a scalar energy function whose gradient is the denoising field. We establish that under…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yanbiao Ji , Qiuchang Li , Yuting Hu , Shaokai Wu , Wenyuan Xie , Guodong Zhang , Qicheng He , Deyi Ji , Yue Ding , Hongtao Lu

An important consideration for variable selection in interaction models is to design an appropriate penalty that respects hierarchy of the importance of the variables. A common theme is to include an interaction term only after the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-03-31 Junlong Zhao , Chenlei Leng

We prove that a single-layer neural network trained with the Q-learning algorithm converges in distribution to a random ordinary differential equation as the size of the model and the number of training steps become large. Analysis of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Justin Sirignano , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos

We study reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state spaces, where data are generated online from a single trajectory under a Markovian behavior policy. To avoid maintaining an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Shengbo Wang

While Value Iteration (VI) is one of the most fundamental algorithms in Reinforcement Learning, its theoretical convergence guarantees still exhibit a persistent mismatch with empirical behavior. In the discounted-reward case, classical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Arsenii Mustafin , Xinyi Sheng , Dominik Baumann

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider