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We study lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) in a regret minimization setting of linear contextual Markov decision process (MDP), where the agent needs to learn a multi-task policy while solving a streaming sequence of tasks. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Sanae Amani , Lin F. Yang , Ching-An Cheng

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

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

Designing reinforcement learning (RL) problems that can produce delicate and precise manipulation policies requires careful choice of the reward function, state, and action spaces. Much prior work on applying RL to manipulation tasks has…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-26 Patrick Varin , Lev Grossman , Scott Kuindersma

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a well studied framework for solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. Exact methods for solving MDPs based on dynamic programming such as policy iteration and value iteration are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-09-09 Yanping Huang

The fundamental theorem of statistical learning states that for binary classification problems, any Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) learning rule has close to optimal sample complexity. In this paper we seek for a generic optimal learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-13 Amit Daniely , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Chang Liu , Yunfan Li , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are often phrased in terms of Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this thesis we go beyond MDPs and consider RL in environments that are non-Markovian, non-ergodic and only partially observable. Our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-11-29 Jan Leike

We study best-policy identification for finite-horizon risk-sensitive reinforcement learning under the entropic risk measure. Recent work established a constant gap in the exponential horizon dependence between lower and upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Amer Essakine , Claire Vernade

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from the curse of dimensionality when the state-action space is large. A common practice is to parameterize the high-dimensional value and policy functions using given features. However…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Lin F. Yang , Mengdi Wang

We study computationally and statistically efficient reinforcement learning under the linear $Q^{\pi}$ realizability assumption, where any policy's $Q$-function is linear in a given state-action feature representation. Prior methods in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yijing Ke , Zihan Zhang , Ruosong Wang

In this paper, we consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with error states. Error states are those states entering which is undesirable or dangerous. We define the risk with respect to a policy as the probability of entering such a state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-13 P. Geibel , F. Wysotzki

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

While humans readily generalize abstract concepts to more complex or larger tasks, building Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems with this ability remains elusive. Here, we present the first theoretical model of how such Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nasehatul Mustakim , Lucas Lehnert

Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Lin F. Yang

The paradigm of decision-making has been revolutionised by reinforcement learning and deep learning. Although this has led to significant progress in domains such as robotics, healthcare, and finance, the use of RL in practice is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Daqian Shao

Efficient exploration is one of the key challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most traditional sample efficiency bounds require strategic exploration. Recently many deep RL algorithms with simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Emma Brunskill

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Following the pivotal success of learning strategies to win at tasks, solely by interacting with an environment without any supervision, agents have gained the ability to make sequential decisions in complex MDPs. Yet, reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Ezgi Korkmaz

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