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Bootstrapping is behind much of the successes of deep Reinforcement Learning. However, learning the value function via bootstrapping often leads to unstable training due to fast-changing target values. Target Networks are employed to…

In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-10-06 Dominik Meyer , Hao Shen , Klaus Diepold

We initiate the mathematical study of replicability as an algorithmic property in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). We focus on the fundamental setting of discounted tabular MDPs with access to a generative model. Inspired by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Amin Karbasi , Grigoris Velegkas , Lin F. Yang , Felix Zhou

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

We propose a simple architecture for deep reinforcement learning by embedding inputs into a learned Fourier basis and show that it improves the sample efficiency of both state-based and image-based RL. We perform infinite-width analysis of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Alexander C. Li , Deepak Pathak

We focus on the task of approximating the optimal value function in deep reinforcement learning. This iterative process is comprised of solving a sequence of optimization problems where the loss function changes per iteration. The common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Kavosh Asadi , Rasool Fakoor , Shoham Sabach

Various data augmentation techniques have been recently proposed in image-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Although they empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of data augmentation for improving sample efficiency or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Jianshu Hu , Yunpeng Jiang , Paul Weng

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been proven essential for tuning large language models (LLMs), it can lead to reward over-optimization (ROO). Existing approaches address ROO by adding KL regularization, requiring computationally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Mathieu Rita , Florian Strub , Rahma Chaabouni , Paul Michel , Emmanuel Dupoux , Olivier Pietquin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the de facto standard for tuning LLMs to solve tasks involving reasoning. However, growing evidence shows that models trained in such way often suffer from a significant loss in diversity. We argue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Germán Kruszewski , Pierre Erbacher , Jos Rozen , Marc Dymetman

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

In this paper, we propose a principled deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach that is able to accelerate the convergence rate of general deep neural networks (DNNs). With our approach, a deep RL agent (synonym for optimizer in this work)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-14 Jie Fu

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

The process of meta-learning algorithms from data, instead of relying on manual design, is growing in popularity as a paradigm for improving the performance of machine learning systems. Meta-learning shows particular promise for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Alexander David Goldie , Zilin Wang , Jaron Cohen , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Shimon Whiteson

Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nina Mazyavkina , Sergey Sviridov , Sergei Ivanov , Evgeny Burnaev

In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), the learning rate critically influences both stability and performance, yet its optimal value shifts during training as the environment and policy evolve. Standard decay schedulers assume monotonic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Henrique Donâncio , Antoine Barrier , Leah F. South , Florence Forbes

Low-rank regularization (LRR) has been widely applied in various machine learning tasks, but the associated optimization is challenging. Directly optimizing the rank function under constraints is NP-hard in general. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Naiqi Li , Yuqiu Xie , Peiyuan Liu , Tao Dai , Yong Jiang , Shu-Tao Xia

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta

Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Hisham Husain , Kamil Ciosek , Ryota Tomioka

In this work, we study an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem where the experts are planning under a shared reward function but with different, unknown planning horizons. Without the knowledge of discount factors, the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jiayu Yao , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez , Barbara E Engelhardt