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In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yangchen Pan , Junfeng Wen , Chenjun Xiao , Philip Torr

Fast-converging algorithms are a contemporary requirement in reinforcement learning. In the context of linear function approximation, the magnitude of the smallest eigenvalue of the key matrix is a major factor reflecting the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Xingguo Chen , Yu Gong , Shangdong Yang , Wenhao Wang

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Q-Learning is a fundamental off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has the objective of approximating action-value functions in order to learn optimal policies. Nonetheless, it has difficulties in reconciling bias with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Mahammad Humayoo

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Diffusion models have seen tremendous success as generative architectures. Recently, they have been shown to be effective at modelling policies for offline reinforcement learning and imitation learning. We explore using diffusion as a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Liam Schramm , Abdeslam Boularias

In reinforcement learning (RL), the long-term behavior of decision-making policies is evaluated based on their average returns. Distributional RL has emerged, presenting techniques for learning return distributions, which provide additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Julie Alhosh , Harley Wiltzer , David Meger

We propose a new approach to value function approximation which combines linear temporal difference reinforcement learning with subspace identification. In practical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) is complicated by the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Byron Boots , Geoffrey J. Gordon

We present a unifying framework for designing and analysing distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms in terms of recursively estimating statistics of the return distribution. Our key insight is that DRL algorithms can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-22 Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , Saurabh Kumar , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Léonard Blier , Corentin Tallec , Yann Ollivier

Most of the existing works for reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation (FA) focus on understanding the statistical complexity or regret bounds. However, the computation complexity of such approaches is far from being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Dingwen Kong , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang

This paper develops an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at recovering a reward function from the observed actions of an agent. We introduce a strategy to flexibly handle different types of actions with two approximations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Kun Li , Yanan Sui , Joel W. Burdick

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

Network load balancers are central components in data centers, that distributes workloads across multiple servers and thereby contribute to offering scalable services. However, when load balancers operate in dynamic environments with…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Zhiyuan Yao , Zihan Ding , Thomas Heide Clausen

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) models the full return distribution, but existing finite-support or quantile-based methods rely on projections, while recent flow-based approaches can suffer from \emph{boundary mismatch} at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Boyang Xu , Qing Zou , Siqin Yang , Hao Yan

This paper proves that the episodic learning environment of every finite-horizon decision task has a unique steady state under any behavior policy, and that the marginal distribution of the agent's input indeed converges to the steady-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Huang Bojun

Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Ted Fujimoto , Joshua Suetterlein , Samrat Chatterjee , Auroop Ganguly

Distributional reinforcement learning, which focuses on learning the entire return distribution instead of only its expectation in standard RL, has demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing performance. Despite these advancements, our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Ke Sun , Bei Jiang , Linglong Kong

In most value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, the agent estimates only the expected reward for each action and selects the action with the highest reward. In contrast, Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) estimates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Rijul Tandon , Peter Vamplew , Cameron Foale

We present a simple, sample-efficient algorithm for introducing large but directed learning steps in reinforcement learning (RL), through the use of evolutionary operators. The methodology uses a population of RL agents training with a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Harshad Khadilkar