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Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

The difficulty of manually specifying reward functions has led to an interest in using linear temporal logic (LTL) to express objectives for reinforcement learning (RL). However, LTL has the downside that it is sensitive to small…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Rajeev Alur , Osbert Bastani , Kishor Jothimurugan , Mateo Perez , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is attracting attention as an effective way to solve sequential optimization problems that involve high dimensional state/action space and stochastic uncertainties. Many such problems involve constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-01 Haeun Yoo , Victor M. Zavala , Jay H. Lee

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with heuristic methods is an emerging trend for solving optimization problems, which leverages RL's ability to learn from the data generated during the search process. One promising approach is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Arthur Müller , Lukas Vollenkemper

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a fixed batch of data. Due to errors in value estimation from out-of-distribution actions, most offline RL algorithms take the approach of constraining or regularizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Scott Fujimoto , Shixiang Shane Gu

This paper provides a systematic comparison between Fitted Dynamic Programming (DP), where demand is estimated from data, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods in finite-horizon dynamic pricing problems. We analyze their performance…

General Economics · Economics 2026-04-16 Lev Razumovskiy , Nikolay Karenin

In reinforcement learning, the discount factor $\gamma$ controls the agent's effective planning horizon. Traditionally, this parameter was considered part of the MDP; however, as deep reinforcement learning algorithms tend to become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Chen Tessler , Shie Mannor

Reactive synthesis algorithms allow automatic construction of policies to control an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that are optimal with respect to high-level temporal logic specifications. However, they assume that…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Rajeev Alur , Suguman Bansal , Osbert Bastani , Kishor Jothimurugan

Temporal Difference (TD) algorithms are widely used in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their performance is heavily influenced by the size of the neural network. While in supervised learning, the regime of over-parameterization and its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 David Brellmann , Eloïse Berthier , David Filliat , Goran Frehse

Linear temporal logic (LTL) and, more generally, $\omega$-regular objectives are alternatives to the traditional discount sum and average reward objectives in reinforcement learning (RL), offering the advantage of greater comprehensibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Xuan-Bach Le , Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Alexander Rabinovich , Luke Ong

Regularization techniques are widely employed in optimization-based approaches for solving ill-posed inverse problems in data analysis and scientific computing. These methods are based on augmenting the objective with a penalty function,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-08 Yong Sheng Soh , Venkat Chandrasekaran

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Aligning generative diffusion models with human preferences via reinforcement learning (RL) is critical yet challenging. Most existing algorithms are often vulnerable to reward hacking, such as quality degradation, over-stylization, or…

Predictive algorithms are often trained by optimizing some loss function, to which regularization functions are added to impose a penalty for violating constraints. As expected, the addition of such regularization functions can change the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Jessie Finocchiaro

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi