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Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an epsilon-optimal policy from a set of policies with high probability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Adhyyan Narang , Andrew Wagenmaker , Lillian Ratliff , Kevin Jamieson

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has made notable progress in complex control tasks by leveraging temporal abstraction. However, previous HRL algorithms often suffer from serious data inefficiency as environments get large. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Seungjae Lee , Jigang Kim , Inkyu Jang , H. Jin Kim

We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Tongzheng Ren , Jialian Li , Bo Dai , Simon S. Du , Sujay Sanghavi

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) considers problems where learning is performed using only previously collected samples and is helpful for the settings in which collecting new data is costly or risky. In model-based offline RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Mustafa O. Karabag , Ufuk Topcu

Horizon reduction is a common design strategy in offline reinforcement learning (RL), used to mitigate long-horizon credit assignment, improve stability, and enable scalable learning through truncated rollouts, windowed training, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Uday Kumar Nidadala , Venkata Bhumika Guthi

Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

In recent years, the robotics community has made substantial progress in robotic manipulation using deep reinforcement learning (RL). Effectively learning of long-horizon tasks remains a challenging topic. Typical RL-based methods…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-13 Zhihao Li , Zhenglong Sun , Jionglong SU , Jiaming Zhang

Solving long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) addresses this by decomposing tasks into more manageable sub-tasks, but the automatic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yang Yu

While deep reinforcement learning methods have shown impressive results in robot learning, their sample inefficiency makes the learning of complex, long-horizon behaviors with real robot systems infeasible. To mitigate this issue,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Taewook Nam , Shao-Hua Sun , Karl Pertsch , Sung Ju Hwang , Joseph J Lim

Episodic training is a core ingredient of few-shot learning to train models on tasks with limited labelled data. Despite its success, episodic training remains largely understudied, prompting us to ask the question: what is the best way to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Sébastien M. R. Arnold , Guneet S. Dhillon , Avinash Ravichandran , Stefano Soatto

The inverse reinforcement learning approach to imitation learning is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can enable learning from a smaller number of expert demonstrations with more robustness to error compounding than behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Juntao Ren , Gokul Swamy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell , Sanjiban Choudhury

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Michael Janner , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-11 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei

In this paper, we investigate the sample complexity of policy evaluation in infinite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (also known as the off-policy evaluation problem) with linear function approximation. We identify a hard regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Lin Chen , Bruno Scherrer , Peter L. Bartlett

In this paper, we study the problem of regret minimization for episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) both in the model-free and the model-based setting. We focus on learning with general function classes and general model classes, and we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Grigoris Velegkas , Zhuoran Yang , Amin Karbasi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to improve large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet the systematic study of how training scales with task difficulty has been hampered by the lack of controlled, scalable environments. Observed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tianle Wang , Zhaoyang Wang , Guangchen Lan , Xinpeng Wei , Sipeng Zhang , Guanwen Qiu , Abulhair Saparov

We study the following question in the context of imitation learning for continuous control: how are the underlying stability properties of an expert policy reflected in the sample-complexity of an imitation learning task? We provide the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Stephen Tu , Alexander Robey , Tingnan Zhang , Nikolai Matni

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling approach to offline RL by enabling value learning on imagined on-policy trajectories. However, it often suffers from compounding errors due to repeated model inference on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Hojun Chung , Junseo Lee , Songhwai Oh

Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly applied to practical problems with an enormous number of states, where function approximation must be deployed to approximate either the value function or the policy. The introduction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Chi Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Michael I. Jordan