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In reinforcement learning, we encode the potential behaviors of an agent interacting with an environment into an infinite set of policies, the policy space, typically represented by a family of parametric functions. Dealing with such a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Mirco Mutti , Stefano Del Col , Marcello Restelli

In this work, we introduce a stochastic maximum principle (SMP) approach for solving the reinforcement learning problem with the assumption that the unknowns in the environment can be parameterized based on physics knowledge. For the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-14 Richard Archibald , Feng Bao , Jiongmin Yong

Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Rui Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

Approximation of the value functions in value-based deep reinforcement learning induces overestimation bias, resulting in suboptimal policies. We show that when the reinforcement signals received by the agents have a high variance, deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Baturay Saglam , Furkan Burak Mutlu , Dogan Can Cicek , Suleyman Serdar Kozat

Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Despite the increasing popularity of policy gradient methods, they are yet to be widely utilized in sample-scarce applications, such as robotics. The sample efficiency could be improved by making best usage of available information. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Qingfeng Lan , Samuele Tosatto , Homayoon Farrahi , A. Rupam Mahmood

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

We propose a novel actor-critic, model-free reinforcement learning algorithm which employs a Bayesian method of parameter space exploration to solve environments. A Gaussian process is used to learn the expected return of a policy given the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Ashish Rao , Bidipta Sarkar , Tejas Narayanan

The high sample complexity of reinforcement learning challenges its use in practice. A promising approach is to quickly adapt pre-trained policies to new environments. Existing methods for this policy adaptation problem typically rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yuda Song , Aditi Mavalankar , Wen Sun , Sicun Gao

We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions. The task for an agent is to attain the best possible asymptotic reward where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Daniil Ryabko , Marcus Hutter

Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-21 Daochen Wang , Aarthi Sundaram , Robin Kothari , Ashish Kapoor , Martin Roetteler

We develop a general framework for estimating function-valued parameters under equality or inequality constraints in infinite-dimensional statistical models. Such constrained learning problems are common across many areas of statistics and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Razieh Nabi , Nima S. Hejazi , Mark J. van der Laan , David Benkeser

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

Leveraging machine learning methods to solve constraint satisfaction problems has shown promising, but they are mostly limited to a static situation where the problem description is completely known and fixed from the beginning. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Wook Lee , Frans A. Oliehoek

Policy learning utilizing observational data is pivotal across various domains, with the objective of learning the optimal treatment assignment policy while adhering to specific constraints such as fairness, budget, and simplicity. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-12 Pan Zhao , Antoine Chambaz , Julie Josse , Shu Yang

In Reinforcement Learning (abbreviated as RL), an agent interacts with the environment via a set of possible actions, and a reward is generated from some unknown distribution. The task here is to find an optimal set of actions such that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Aditi Anand , Suman Banerjee , Dildar Ali

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Sriram Srinivasan , Marc Lanctot , Vinicius Zambaldi , Julien Perolat , Karl Tuyls , Remi Munos , Michael Bowling

We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Kuo Li , Qing-Shan Jia , Jiaqi Yan

Determining the most appropriate features for machine learning predictive models is challenging regarding performance and feature acquisition costs. In particular, global feature choice is limited given that some features will only benefit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Gabriel Bernardino , Anders Jonsson , Patrick Clarysse , Nicolas Duchateau