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In this paper, we study distributional reinforcement learning from the perspective of statistical efficiency. We investigate distributional policy evaluation, aiming to estimate the complete return distribution (denoted $\eta^\pi$) attained…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-13 Liangyu Zhang , Yang Peng , Jiadong Liang , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

The availability of large pre-trained models is changing the landscape of Machine Learning research and practice, moving from a training-from-scratch to a fine-tuning paradigm. While in some applications the goal is to "nudge" the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Tomasz Korbak , Hady Elsahar , Germán Kruszewski , Marc Dymetman

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) is a recent reinforcement learning framework whose success has been supported by various empirical studies. It relies on the key idea of replacing the expected return with the return distribution,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Rahul Singh , Keuntaek Lee , Yongxin Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Gradient-regularized value learning methods improve sample efficiency by leveraging learned models of transition dynamics and rewards to estimate return gradients. However, existing approaches, such as MAGE, struggle in stochastic or noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Baptiste Debes , Tinne Tuytelaars

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

The distributional reinforcement learning (RL) approach advocates for representing the complete probability distribution of the random return instead of only modelling its expectation. A distributional RL algorithm may be characterised by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Thibaut Théate , Antoine Wehenkel , Adrien Bolland , Gilles Louppe , Damien Ernst

One of the most natural approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation is value iteration, which inductively generates approximations to the optimal value function by solving a sequence of regression problems. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Debmalya Mandal , Paulius Sasnauskas , Goran Radanovic

We introduce a novel framework for analyzing reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces, and use it to prove fast rates of convergence in both off-line and on-line settings. Our analysis highlights two key stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Yaqi Duan , Martin J. Wainwright

Temporal-difference (TD) learning is highly effective at controlling and evaluating an agent's long-term outcomes. Most approaches in this paradigm implement a semi-gradient update to boost the learning speed, which consists of ignoring the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Théo Vincent , Kevin Gerhardt , Yogesh Tripathi , Habib Maraqten , Adam White , Martha White , Jan Peters , Carlo D'Eramo

The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-07 Jinlong Lei , Peng Yi , Jie Chen , Yiguang Hong

We study estimation and inference using data collected by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. These algorithms adaptively experiment by interacting with individual units over multiple stages, updating their strategies based on past…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Vasilis Syrgkanis , Ruohan Zhan

Reinforcement learning algorithms in multi-agent systems deliver highly resilient and adaptable solutions for common problems in telecommunications,aerospace, and industrial robotics. However, achieving an optimal global goal remains a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Changgang Zheng , Shufan Yang , Juan Parra-Ullauri , Antonio Garcia-Dominguez , Nelly Bencomo

In this work we continue to build upon recent advances in reinforcement learning for finite Markov processes. A common approach among previous existing algorithms, both single-actor and distributed, is to either clip rewards or to apply a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Björn Lindenberg , Jonas Nordqvist , Karl-Olof Lindahl

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

We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Weiqin Chen , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu , Santiago Paternain

We propose a novel framework for analyzing the dynamics of distribution shift in real-world systems that captures the feedback loop between learning algorithms and the distributions on which they are deployed. Prior work largely models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Lauren Conger , Franca Hoffmann , Eric Mazumdar , Lillian Ratliff