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The current paper studies sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in settings where only the optimal value function is assumed to be linearly-realizable. It has recently been understood that, even under this seemingly strong assumption…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

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

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

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

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

A long-standing problem in online reinforcement learning (RL) is of ensuring sample efficiency, which stems from an inability to explore environments efficiently. Most attempts at efficient exploration tackle this problem in a setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Aman Mehra , Alexandre Capone , Jeff Schneider

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

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Yuda Song , Wen Sun

In deep reinforcement learning (RL) research, there has been a concerted effort to design more efficient and productive exploration methods while solving sparse-reward problems. These exploration methods often share common principles (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Jonathan C. Balloch , Rishav Bhagat , Geigh Zollicoffer , Ruoran Jia , Julia Kim , Mark O. Riedl

Sequential decision-making agents struggle with long horizon tasks, since solving them requires multi-step reasoning. Most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms address this challenge by improved credit assignment, introducing memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Bogdan Mazoure , Jake Bruce , Doina Precup , Rob Fergus , Ankit Anand

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn from pre-collected datasets without active exploration. This problem faces significant challenges, including limited data availability and distributional shifts. Existing approaches adopt a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Yue Wang , Jinjun Xiong , Shaofeng Zou

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) offers a promising direction for sample efficient learning, often achieving state of the art results for continuous control tasks. However, many existing MBRL methods rely on combining greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Philip Ball , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Krzysztof Choromanski , Stephen Roberts

In online reinforcement learning (online RL), balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial for finding an optimal policy in a sample-efficient way. To achieve this, existing sample-efficient online RL algorithms typically consist of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Hao Hu , Shenao Zhang , Sirui Zheng , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have demonstrated its ability to solve hard agent-environment interaction tasks on a super-human level. However, the application of reinforcement learning methods to practical and real-world tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Oleg Svidchenko , Aleksei Shpilman

Meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), as a combination of meta-learning ideas and reinforcement learning (RL), enables the agent to adapt to different tasks using a few samples. However, this sampling-based adaptation also makes meta RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Tao Li , Haozhe Lei , Quanyan Zhu