English
Related papers

Related papers: CertRL: Formalizing Convergence Proofs for Value a…

200 papers

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Junyu Zhang , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Navyata Sanghvi , Shinnosuke Usami , Mohit Sharma , Joachim Groeger , Kris Kitani

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

The automatic synthesis of a policy through reinforcement learning (RL) from a given set of formal requirements depends on the construction of a reward signal and consists of the iterative application of many policy-improvement steps. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Luigi Berducci , Radu Grosu

The goal of robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn a policy that is robust against the uncertainty in model parameters. Parameter uncertainty commonly occurs in many real-world RL applications due to simulator modeling errors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

In reinforcement learning (RL), Q-learning is a fundamental algorithm whose convergence is guaranteed in the tabular setting. However, this convergence guarantee does not hold under linear function approximation. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hyukjun Yang , Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

Q-learning with neural network function approximation (neural Q-learning for short) is among the most prevalent deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Despite its empirical success, the non-asymptotic convergence rate of neural Q-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

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 a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP), the objective is to find the optimal value function, i.e., the value function corresponding to an optimal policy. This problem reduces to solving a functional equation known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Zhe Xu , Ivan Gavran , Yousef Ahmad , Rupak Majumdar , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu , Bo Wu

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with complex dynamical systems that demand interactions at high frequencies or irregular time intervals. Continuous-time RL (CTRL) has emerged as a promising alternative by replacing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Xuefeng Wang , Lei Zhang , Henglin Pu , Ahmed H. Qureshi , Husheng Li

This paper applies a reinforcement learning (RL) method to solve infinite horizon continuous-time stochastic linear quadratic problems, where drift and diffusion terms in the dynamics may depend on both the state and control. Based on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-17 Na Li , Xun Li , Jing Peng , Zuo Quan Xu

Recent advances of Reinforcement Learning (RL) have highlighted its potential in complex reasoning tasks, yet effective training often relies on external supervision, which limits the broader applicability. In this work, we propose a novel…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Kongcheng Zhang , Qi Yao , Shunyu Liu , Yingjie Wang , Baisheng Lai , Jieping Ye , Mingli Song , Dacheng Tao

Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Denis Belomestny , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov

We study the problem of joint optimization involving coding and control policies for a controlled Markovian sytem over a finite-rate noiseless communication channel. While structural results on the optimal encoding and control have been…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-18 Evelyn Hubbard , Liam Cregg , Serdar Yüksel

We propose an automata-theoretic approach for reinforcement learning (RL) under complex spatio-temporal constraints with time windows. The problem is formulated using a Markov decision process under a bounded temporal logic constraint.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Xiaoshan Lin , Abbasali Koochakzadeh , Yasin Yazicioglu , Derya Aksaray

We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Weiqin Chen , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu , Santiago Paternain

The goal of this work is to serve as a foundation for deep studies of the topology of state, action, and policy spaces in reinforcement learning. By studying these spaces from a mathematical perspective, we expect to gain more insight into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 David Krame Kadurha