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Large language models (LLMs) typically approach combinatorial optimization as an inference-time procedure, solving each instance separately through sampling, search, or repeated prompting. We ask whether reinforcement learning can instead…
Many practical decision-making problems involve tasks whose success depends on the entire system history, rather than on achieving a state with desired properties. Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are not suitable for such…
Reinforcement learning with function approximation has recently achieved tremendous results in applications with large state spaces. This empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work proposing necessary and sufficient…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the agnostic policy learning setting, where the goal is to find a policy whose performance is competitive with the best policy in a given class of interest $\Pi$ -- crucially, without assuming that…
We consider a reinforcement learning setting introduced in (Maillard et al., NIPS 2011) where the learner does not have explicit access to the states of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP). Instead, she has access to several models…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as an efficient method of choice for solving complex sequential decision making problems in automatic control, computer science, economics, and biology. In this paper we present a model-free RL…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function…
Despite significant progress in challenging problems across various domains, applying state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms remains challenging due to their sensitivity to the choice of hyperparameters. This…
The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, with the learning rate being particularly influential. RL algorithms fail to reach convergence or demand an extensive number of samples…
We present new policy mirror descent (PMD) methods for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems with either strongly convex or general convex regularizers. By exploring the structural properties of these overall highly nonconvex…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
In real-world reinforcement learning applications the learner's observation space is ubiquitously high-dimensional with both relevant and irrelevant information about the task at hand. Learning from high-dimensional observations has been…
Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning is a formally elegant approach to learning optimal behaviour under model uncertainty, trading off exploration and exploitation in an ideal way. Unfortunately, finding the resulting Bayes-optimal…
Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efficiency, especially when using image…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks with stiff frictional elements like connector insertion are difficult to model with rigid-body simulators. In this work, we propose a new approach for modeling these environments by learning a quasi-static…
We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…
Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…