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Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

The Robust Regularized Markov Decision Process (RRMDP) is proposed to learn policies robust to dynamics shifts by adding regularization to the transition dynamics in the value function. Existing methods mostly use unstructured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Cheng Tang , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

We present an iterative inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to infer optimal cost functions in continuous spaces. Based on a popular maximum entropy criteria, our approach iteratively finds a weight improvement step and proposes a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Sarmad Mehrdad , Avadesh Meduri , Ludovic Righetti

We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving $\sqrt{T}$ regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Christoph Dann , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

We introduce a new algorithm for reinforcement learning called Maximum aposteriori Policy Optimisation (MPO) based on coordinate ascent on a relative entropy objective. We show that several existing methods can directly be related to our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Abbas Abdolmaleki , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Yuval Tassa , Remi Munos , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller

Several researchers have recently investigated the connection between reinforcement learning and classification. We are motivated by proposals of approximate policy iteration schemes without value functions which focus on policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2008-07-06 Christos Dimitrakakis , Michail G. Lagoudakis

This paper proposes an observer-based framework for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) when an accurate model is not available. We first propose to use a Moving Horizon Estimation-Model Predictive Control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-23 Hossein Nejatbakhsh Esfahani , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sebastien Gros

Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

Entropy Regularisation is a widely adopted technique that enhances policy optimisation performance and stability. A notable form of entropy regularisation is augmenting the objective with an entropy term, thereby simultaneously optimising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jean Seong Bjorn Choe , Jong-Kook Kim

In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-14 Christos Dimitrakakis

We propose a novel constrained reinforcement learning method for finding optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes while satisfying temporal logic constraints with a desired probability throughout the learning process. An…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Derya Aksaray , Yasin Yazicioglu , Ahmet Semi Asarkaya

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

This work uses the entropy-regularised relaxed stochastic control perspective as a principled framework for designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Herein agent interacts with the environment by generating noisy controls…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Yashaswini Murthy , Mehrdad Moharrami , R. Srikant

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

This note re-visits the rolling-horizon control approach to the problem of a Markov decision process (MDP) with infinite-horizon discounted expected reward criterion. Distinguished from the classical value-iteration approach, we develop an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-07 Hyeong Soo Chang

We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Han Zhong , Zhongren Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Csaba Szepesvári

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Yue Wang , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou