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Function approximation has been an indispensable component in modern reinforcement learning algorithms designed to tackle problems with large state spaces in high dimensions. This paper reviews recent results on error analysis for these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Jihao Long , Jiequn Han

We study finite-time horizon continuous-time linear-quadratic reinforcement learning problems in an episodic setting, where both the state and control coefficients are unknown to the controller. We first propose a least-squares algorithm…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Matteo Basei , Xin Guo , Anran Hu , Yufei Zhang

Model-based reinforcement learning is one approach to increase sample efficiency. However, the accuracy of the dynamics model and the resulting compounding error over modelled trajectories are commonly regarded as key limitations. A natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Daniel Palenicek , Michael Lutter , Joao Carvalho , Jan Peters

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yiannis Kantaros , Jun Wang

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Lei Zhao , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aya Kayal , Sattar Vakili , Laura Toni , Alberto Bernacchia

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

Supervised learning is often computationally easy in practice. But to what extent does this mean that other modes of learning, such as reinforcement learning (RL), ought to be computationally easy by extension? In this work we show the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

In offline imitation learning (IL), we generally assume only a handful of expert trajectories and a supplementary offline dataset from suboptimal behaviors to learn the expert policy. While it is now common to minimize the divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Hee-Jun Ahn , Seong-Woong Shim , Byung-Jun Lee

This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jiamin Xu , Ivan Nazarov , Aditya Rastogi , África Periáñez , Kyra Gan

We study finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation for both policy evaluation and policy optimization. Prior work established that statistically efficient learning is impossible for either of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Volodymyr Tkachuk , Csaba Szepesvári , Xiaoqi Tan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs) using a pre-collected dataset. In this work, we revisit the linear programming (LP) reformulation of Markov decision processes for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Asuman Ozdaglar , Sarath Pattathil , Jiawei Zhang , Kaiqing Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for deriving control policies for complex systems. As we show in two control problems, the derived policies from using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Deep Q-Network (DQN)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Jan de Priester , Ricardo G. Sanfelice , Nathan van de Wouw

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Andrew Levy , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

Long-horizon manipulation tasks such as stacking represent a longstanding challenge in the field of robotic manipulation, particularly when using reinforcement learning (RL) methods which often struggle to learn the correct sequence of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Jing Zhang , Emmanuel Dean , Karinne Ramirez-Amaro

The epidemic failure of replicability across empirical science and machine learning has recently motivated the formal study of replicable learning algorithms [Impagliazzo et al. (2022)]. In batch settings where data comes from a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Max Hopkins , Sihan Liu , Christopher Ye , Yuichi Yoshida

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated its potential to learn complex robotic manipulation tasks. However, RL still requires the robot to collect a large amount of real-world experience. To address this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Bohan Wu , Feng Xu , Zhanpeng He , Abhi Gupta , Peter K. Allen

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

We tackle the challenge of building embodied AI agents that can reliably solve long-horizon planning problems. Imitation learning from demonstrations has shown itself to be effective in training robots to solve a diversity of complex tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Dillon Z. Chen , Till Hofmann , Toryn Q. Klassen , Sheila A. McIlraith