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Most conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms aim to optimize decision-making rules in terms of the expected returns. However, especially for risk management purposes, other risk-sensitive criteria such as the value-at-risk or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Tetsuro Morimura , Masashi Sugiyama , Hisashi Kashima , Hirotaka Hachiya , Toshiyuki Tanaka

Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms provide a data-driven way to acquire policies that quickly adapt to many tasks with varying rewards or dynamics functions. However, learned meta-policies are often effective only on the exact task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Anurag Ajay , Abhishek Gupta , Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine , Pulkit Agrawal

Rewards serve as a measure of user satisfaction and act as a limiting factor in interactive recommender systems. In this research, we focus on the problem of learning to reward (LTR), which is fundamental to reinforcement learning. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Jialin Liu , Xinyan Su , Zeyu He , Xiangyu Zhao , Jun Li

The recently proposed distributional approach to reinforcement learning (DiRL) is centered on learning the distribution of the reward-to-go, often referred to as the value distribution. In this work, we show that the distributional Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Dror Freirich , Ron Meir , Aviv Tamar

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows an agent interacting sequentially with an environment to maximize its long-term expected return. In the distributional RL (DistrRL) paradigm, the agent goes beyond the limit of the expected value, to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Mastane Achab , Reda Alami , Yasser Abdelaziz Dahou Djilali , Kirill Fedyanin , Eric Moulines

Meta-reinforcement learning trains a single reinforcement learning agent on a distribution of tasks to quickly generalize to new tasks outside of the training set at test time. From a Bayesian perspective, one can interpret this as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Joery A. de Vries , Jinke He , Mathijs M. de Weerdt , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The aim of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a discounted…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-14 Yang Peng , Kaicheng Jin , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

A growing trend for value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is to capture more information than scalar value functions in the value network. One of the most well-known methods in this branch is distributional RL, which models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Pushi Zhang , Xiaoyu Chen , Li Zhao , Wei Xiong , Tao Qin , Tie-Yan Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

In distributional reinforcement learning not only expected returns but the complete return distributions of a policy are taken into account. The return distribution for a fixed policy is given as the solution of an associated distributional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-29 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) models the full return distribution, but existing finite-support or quantile-based methods rely on projections, while recent flow-based approaches can suffer from \emph{boundary mismatch} at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Boyang Xu , Qing Zou , Siqin Yang , Hao Yan

Conventional off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on maximizing the expected return of scalar rewards. Distributional RL (DRL), in contrast, studies the distribution of returns with the distributional Bellman operator in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-15 Dong Neuck Lee , Michael R. Kosorok

While most reinforcement learning methods today flatten the distribution of future returns to a single scalar value, distributional RL methods exploit the return distribution to provide stronger learning signals and to enable applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Perry Dong , Chongyi Zheng , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh , Benjamin Eysenbach

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

Since their introduction a year ago, distributional approaches to reinforcement learning (distributional RL) have produced strong results relative to the standard approach which models expected values (expected RL). However, aside from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Clare Lyle , Pablo Samuel Castro , Marc G. Bellemare

We propose a distributional framework for offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that jointly models uncertainty over reward functions and full distributions of returns. Unlike conventional IRL approaches that recover a deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Feiyang Wu , Ye Zhao , Anqi Wu

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved empirical success in various domains. One core task in DRL is distributional policy evaluation, which involves estimating the return distribution $\eta^\pi$ for a given policy $\pi$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-17 Yang Peng , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang