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To tackle long planning horizon problems in reinforcement learning with general function approximation, we propose the first algorithm, termed as UCRL-WVTR, that achieves both \emph{horizon-free} and \emph{instance-dependent}, since it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Jiayi Huang , Han Zhong , Liwei Wang , Lin F. Yang

This paper is concerned with the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation in discounted infinite horizon Markov decision processes. We investigate the sample complexities required to guarantee a predefined estimation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-03 Gen Li , Weichen Wu , Yuejie Chi , Cong Ma , Alessandro Rinaldo , Yuting Wei

Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Bohan Zhang , Michael Chen , A. Pavan , N. V. Vinodchandran , Lin F. Yang , Ruosong Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated promising results on complex tasks, yet often require impractical numbers of samples since they learn from scratch. Meta-RL aims to address this challenge by leveraging experience…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-28 Russell Mendonca , Abhishek Gupta , Rosen Kralev , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation. Existing research is mixed regarding whether training on easier or harder data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Yeganeh Kordi , Nihal V. Nayak , Max Zuo , Ilana Nguyen , Stephen H. Bach

Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Chenjie Mao

We propose a hierarchical entity-centric framework for offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) that combines subgoal decomposition with factored structure to solve long-horizon tasks in domains with multiple entities.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Dan Haramati , Carl Qi , Tal Daniel , Amy Zhang , Aviv Tamar , George Konidaris

We study the optimal sample complexity in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems with policy space generalization, i.e. the agent has a prior knowledge that the optimal policy lies in a known policy space. Existing results show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Wenlong Mou , Zheng Wen , Xi Chen

This paper studies the robustness of reinforcement learning algorithms to errors in the learning process. Specifically, we revisit the benchmark problem of discrete-time linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and study the long-standing open…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-16 Bo Pang , Zhong-Ping Jiang

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has seen widespread interest as an approach to tractable learning of complex modular behaviors. However, existing work either assume access to expert-constructed hierarchies, or use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Kurtland Chua , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

While many classical notions of learnability (e.g., PAC learnability) are distribution-free, utilizing the specific structures of an input distribution may improve learning performance. For example, a product distribution on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Tao Lin

In this paper, we propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach for solving the Active Information Acquisition problem, which requires an agent to choose a sequence of actions in order to acquire information about a process of interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Heejin Jeong , Brent Schlotfeldt , Hamed Hassani , Manfred Morari , Daniel D. Lee , George J. Pappas

Large reasoning models (LRMs) often consume excessive tokens, inflating computational cost and latency. More broadly, in goal reaching sequential decision problems we often want to reach the goal quickly, and LRM reasoning can be viewed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Alex Ayoub , Kavosh Asadi , Dale Schuurmans , Csaba Szepesvári , Karim Bouyarmane

The application of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces unique challenges and potential deviations from findings in text-only domains, particularly for perception-heavy tasks. This…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zifu Wang , Junyi Zhu , Bo Tang , Zhiyu Li , Feiyu Xiong , Jiaqian Yu , Matthew B. Blaschko

Implementing an autonomous vehicle that is able to output feasible, smooth and efficient trajectories is a long-standing challenge. Several approaches have been considered, roughly falling under two categories: rule-based and learning-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Branka Mirchevska , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

This paper studies the safe reinforcement learning problem formulated as an episodic finite-horizon tabular constrained Markov decision process with an unknown transition kernel and stochastic reward and cost functions. We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Kihyun Yu , Duksang Lee , William Overman , Dabeen Lee

For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang