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While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-02 Erfaun Noorani , Christos Mavridis , John Baras

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Zhiao Huang , Litian Liang , Zhan Ling , Xuanlin Li , Chuang Gan , Hao Su

In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-01-04 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Nadav Timor , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv , Micah Goldblum , Yann LeCun , David Harel

We study the problem of parameter-free stochastic optimization, inquiring whether, and under what conditions, do fully parameter-free methods exist: these are methods that achieve convergence rates competitive with optimally tuned methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Amit Attia , Tomer Koren

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Training sophisticated agents for optimal decision-making under uncertainty has been key to the rapid development of modern autonomous systems across fields. Notably, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled decision-making agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Thomas Banker , Ali Mesbah

Policy Gradient methods that explore directly in parameter space are among the most effective and robust direct policy search methods and have drawn a lot of attention lately. The basic method from this field, Policy Gradients with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-12-16 Frank Sehnke

Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Reda Ouhamma , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Philippe Preux

Although recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of mastering complicated decision-making tasks, the sample complexity of these methods has remained a hurdle to utilizing them in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Saeed Moazami , Peggy Doerschuk

Estimating the dependences between random variables, and ranking them accordingly, is a prevalent problem in machine learning. Pursuing frequentist and information-theoretic approaches, we first show that the p-value and the mutual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-02 Harald Steck

We address the problem of learning an unknown smooth function and its derivatives from noisy pointwise evaluations under the supremum norm. While classical nonparametric regression provides a strong theoretical foundation, traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Davide Maran , Marcello Restelli

We study the model-based reward-free reinforcement learning with linear function approximation for episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, the agent works in two phases. In the exploration phase, the agent interacts with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Bruce D. Lee , Ingvar Ziemann , George J. Pappas , Nikolai Matni

We study adaptive combinatorial maximization, which is a core challenge in machine learning, with applications in active learning as well as many other domains. We study the Bayesian setting, and consider the objectives of maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Shlomi Weitzman , Sivan Sabato

Although evidence integration to the boundary model has successfully explained a wide range of behavioral and neural data in decision making under uncertainty, how animals learn and optimize the boundary remains unresolved. Here, we propose…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Jamal Esmaily , Rani Moran , Yasser Roudi , Bahador Bahrami

Traditional model-based reinforcement learning approaches learn a model of the environment dynamics without explicitly considering how it will be used by the agent. In the presence of misspecified model classes, this can lead to poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Pierluca D'Oro , Alberto Maria Metelli , Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli